


Impostor Syndrome

by QuailiTea



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Bribery, Case Fic, Detective Dot, Dogs, F/M, Greece, How Do You Flirt From Another Continent?, Long-Distance Relationship, Petty Theft, Reunion Fic, Spaghettigram, Telegrams, Wrongful Imprisonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-01-10 00:36:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 28,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuailiTea/pseuds/QuailiTea
Summary: Miss Fisher made it almost halfway to England without her plans changing drastically. That's probably a record. But Jane is in trouble, and so is the old Collingwood friend who's been looking after her. Hang on tight everyone, we're flying to Greece.





	1. Dear Miss Fisher

**Author's Note:**

> Call this my vision for Season 4 Episode 1. I know it's going to be thoroughly eradicated by the movie, but that's ok! This will hold us over.

_Dear Miss Fisher,_ the note read. _I hope this reaches your destination before you have disappeared into the skies once more. I have received an urgent telegram from Jane, and knowing you to be in a better position than expected to help her, beg that you deposit the Baron into whatever conveyance you deem secure enough to return him to England, and reroute yourself to Athens._

The Hon. Phryne Fisher folded the letter over for a moment to search out her father, the Baron in question. He was sitting, white-faced and trembling, in a canvas chair helpfully provided by an airport attendant, having retreated a short distance away while trying to regain his composure. The man hated planes, and the journey had not been without more than its fair share of narrow misses. But she had landed them in Bombay, with an intact bird to boot, so he had no reason to complain. The Baron did not seem to agree. The attendant provided a glass of liquor, which her father downed without blinking, then held out for another. She continued reading.

_It seems, Miss, that the tour she has been on while away has run into trouble of an unspecified sort, and she and several of her traveling companions are concerned about their safety. They are staying at the Hotel Artemisia, but are under military guard. If I do not hear from you within the week, I will assume my letter has missed you. If not, please be advised I have sent a copy of this letter to each stop on your route._ It was signed by Mr. Butler and dated only four days previous. Air mail was a wonderful thing. He was looking after the house during Dot’s absence on her honeymoon, so that must have been why he’d gotten word so quickly. Jane in trouble, she thought, but not immediate danger, or surely Kitty and Steven would have sent word. She couldn’t fathom Steven Grant losing track of a shilling, let alone Jane and an unspecified number of other girls under his care. And it stretched the imagination even further to think of Katherine Grant, cautious, particular, savvy Kitty, not having plans in place for almost any scenario. Kitty was an old Collingwood friend, one of the children she had played with in her guttersnipe days, with the same street-sense and wiliness as Phryne. She had married up and promptly set about improving her husband’s fortunes with every ounce of the intelligence she’d once used to connive meat out from under the butcher’s nose. If Kitty were in strife, along with her adopted daughter, well. Decisively, Phryne stuffed the letter into the pocket of her flying jacket and stood. She ran a hand through the black cap of her hair, feeling distinctly ruffled. “Father,” she called. The man looked up, still a little green around the gills. “If I buy you a passage with a reasonable room, will you promise to get on and stay on this time?”

“Phryne, my dear,” he began, lurching forward like a drowning man towards a spar of driftwood, “I would stay put if you booked me in the cargo hold and insisted I shovel coal. Just please don’t drag me up in that thing again.” She glared at him for a long moment, but he showed no signs of dissembling. His face was grayish and the hand that was not clutching his glass was trembling badly. Possibly the typhoon over Hong Kong had well and truly frightened the mischief out of him. At least temporarily.

“Good,” she snapped. “There has been a change in plans.” She climbed up the steps of the little two-seater and dragged his bags from the seat. “You sir,” she said to the man who had applied the chocks to the wheels. The man sprang to attention as the bags hit the ground with a thump. Military bearing confirmed.

“Ma’am?”

“Are there any ships leaving for England tonight?”

“Cargo steamship _Mylva_ , Ma’am. Bound for Southampton. Departs at slack tide around 10pm.”

“Ten pounds to you if you can get this man from here to a room on that ship. And lock and bolt the door on him once he’s in.”

“Ma’am, yes Ma’am.” His expression was bemused. “I can assure you, your prisoner will be duly escorted.” The Baron gave a relieved sigh as the man assisted him up from his chair. Clearly, the choice between being impressed into service on a steamer or getting back onto Phryne’s plane was an easy one.

“Now,” she said with a gesture at Rigel. “I need a full tank of fuel, some maps, someone who knows how to co-pilot a Moth, and someone to take a message down to the telegraph office.” A flurry of activity erupted as she pulled a packet of banknotes out of her jacket. “And I’ll need to leave a forwarding address, just in case. I’m flying out at first light.”

\---

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson was concentrating. Yes, he was definitely concentrating very hard on cleaning his service pistol and putting his flat in order on a sunny morning before work, and not thinking in the slightest about a certain lady detective. An admirable, albeit irritating, lady detective who wore astonishing red lipstick, smelt intoxicatingly of French perfume, and was probably wafting that scent across the hemispheres as she flew her father to the welcoming arms of her mother in England. And her own self to the welcoming arms of any number of amenable members of… No. Stop it. He was concentrating. And he was handling a gun, which required concentration. And a certain amount of care, particularly if he wanted it to function the next time he needed it. Like to shoot some of those amenable English fellows, possibly. “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” he burst out. The words rang around the room, but there was no response, either from the single photograph of his parents on the cream-papered wall, the forlorn-looking grate on the fireplace, or the inquisitive bird perched outside the open window. For perhaps the hundredth time that day, he glanced at his empty suitcase next to the desk. His suits and shirts hanging in a single regimental row in the wardrobe, waiting for mobilization. His hat on the peg by the door and his coat over the chair where he’d laid it last night to dry. A lone cymbidium orchid in a pot on the table. The bits of his pistol arranged tidily on the desk in front of him. His job was here. His life was here. And Collins was on his honeymoon. That, at least, pulled him up short. He most certainly couldn’t leave the station without both Detective and Senior Constable. “But,” he said, addressing the bird, “I can still write her a letter, now can’t I?” He put the pistol back together with precise movements, tucked it safely away in its holster, and pulled out a sheet of paper and his fountain pen, remembering the feel of her hair in his hands as he’d kissed her. “And I hope Constable Collins doesn’t decide to extend his honeymoon. There is a limit even to that.”

\---

_Dear Miss Fisher,_ wrote Dot. _We are having a splendid time in Geelong._ She paused. It was hard to come up with the words to sound interesting – after all, Miss Phryne was gallivanting across continents with her disreputable father who attracted nearly as much excitement as his daughter did; she and Hugh Collins were only a few hours away from the Esplanade, ensconced in a seaside hotel. _Married life has been lovely so far, and the hotel is quite beautiful. I hope you and the Baron landed safely in…_ Where was it she said they had been going? It was Perth first, she knew that. Then Hong Kong, then… “Hugh?” she called out. “Hugh dear?”

“Yes, Mrs. Collins?” Her wonderful policeman husband poked his head around the doorframe, his face shining the way it did every time he called her by her married name. “What is it Dottie?”

“Do you remember where Miss Fisher said to send her mail to?”

“I don’t, Dottie.” Her face fell, trying to puzzle out where she might have left the list. “But,” he added, eager to help, “I can call Mr. Butler. I’m sure she left her itinerary with him as well.”

“Would you, Hugh? Oh, thank you. I want to send her a postcard, so she doesn’t forget about us while she’s up in the air.”

“Dottie, she won’t forget us,” Hugh smiled. “She might get distracted by something, but you’re her right hand. Also,” he added, striding over to wrap his arms around her shoulders, “you’re meant to be keeping her household correspondence running while she’s gone, so nobody looking for a detective is waiting on her. And writing columns for Women’s Choice, which should keep you busy in the meantime.”

“I know, Hugh,” said Dot, blushing at his closeness. “I’m glad you don’t mind so much as you used to.”

“Dottie, you wouldn’t be my Dottie if you weren’t being your own brave, capable self.” He smiled again, with a slightly more romantic look on his open, honest face. “Besides, answering letters is a far cry from being a hostage or safe-breaking or anything else like that.”

“That’s true, of course.” His hands were creeping closer around her waist, and she felt fairly sure she was going to be abandoning the postcard momentarily. “I’ll have a few things to go through while you go fishing.”

“Well, let’s worry about that later then,” he suggested, bringing her wrist to his lips. Dottie laughed and kissed him. It was her honeymoon after all.

\---

Mr. Butler gave a sigh of relief when the telegram arrived. A lot of bad memories attached to telegrams, most usually, but in this case, it portended better news. He popped the envelope open and read the message, feeling cheered. She’d gotten his letter. “Excellent,” he said. Miss Fisher was on the case. But before he could return to the kitchen to finish his morning cuppa, the doorbell and the telephone bell rang simultaneously. He opted to answer the door first. “Ah, Doctor Macmillan and Inspector Robinson?” Perhaps Miss Fisher had sent more than one message.

“We met on the sidewalk,” Mac explained, striding forward. “Won’t be but a moment, but it can wait until you answer the telephone.” She took her trilby off and stood aside for Jack, who followed her inside. Mr. Butler attended to the telephone, making quick shorthand notes as he listened.

“Just stopping by, Jack?” The Detective Inspector shifted a little uncomfortably under the good doctor’s sardonic look. “I thought I’d see if there’d been any communiques from our dear friend, since I’ve received none while out at the morgue. She has a terrible habit of forgetting the telegraph office when she’s off adventuring.”

“I, er, I thought the same,” he confessed, one hand curling protectively around the letter in his pocket. He was not usually this bad at making small talk. “Fifteen days puts them somewhere between Calcutta and Egypt, depending on the weather, I believe?”

“Actually, sir,” said Mr. Butler, who had hung up the telephone, “she is on her way to Greece.” Mac raised an eyebrow. Jack did the same. “In fact…” He was cut off by the telephone ringing yet again. Today was going to be a bit of a trial, it seemed. “Excuse me a moment.”

“Greece?” Jack mouthed to the doctor. He could see the wheels turning in her head.

“Jane!” she replied, insight flashing. “It has to be. That’s where she’s been touring, with Phryne’s friends.”

“But what about the Baron? Surely, she wouldn’t want to risk a detour, anxious as she was to get him home.” Jack shook his head. Something felt off about this. Mr. Butler was relaying a message to what sounded like Hugh on the other end of the line, but pointed at the telegram lying on the table next to him. Mac snatched it up ahead of Jack’s reaching hand, scanned it, then passed it to him.

_Headed Athens STOP Baron steaming to England padlock on his cabin STOP Hired copilot will be there in three days STOP Send mail Hotel Artemisia STOP Will sort this and find Jane STOP Love to all STOP PFisher_

“What could have happened?” Jack was aghast. Poor Jane. Although, he had to admit, Phryne coming after her like an avenging angel was a better chance than most girls stranded in a foreign country would have.

“I believe I can answer that,” said Mr. Butler. He had hung up the phone and was holding a sheet of notepaper. “That first phone call was from a contact of Mr. Steven Grant’s, who was escorting Jane and five other girls on their tour with his wife. Mr. Grant’s wife, it seems, has run up against a new Greek law against ‘insurrectional ideas.’”

“Communism,” said Mac. It wasn’t a question.

“Something of the sort. The telegrams he has been sent indicate some sort of confusion over whether it is Mrs. Grant or one of the girls that had been affiliating with suspect persons, but the result is that Mrs. Grant had been detained and sent to Athens, while Mr. Grant and the girls proceeded with the tour, but they are now under house-arrest in Athens as well while being investigated as potential agents sent by foreign powers to undermine Greek governmental stability.”

“But that’s absurd!” Mac snorted. “Sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls on an art tour with two respectable adults – converting the populace into red-raggers.”

“That can’t be the whole story,” Jack insisted. “Did he say anything else? Who are the other girls with Jane?” Mr. Butler held up a hand.

“I’ve informed the man – a Mr. Herbert Angelton – that if he calls down to City South Police Station in about an hour when the Detective Inspector is in, that you will be able to provide him with all the help he could require.”

“But what use could the Victoria police force be to Mr. Angelton or his employer?”

“From what Mr. Angelton tells me, one of the girls is likely an impostor, which means there might well have been either a kidnapping or a murder just before they boarded the ship.”


	2. All Hands on Deck

Jack had driven to the police station at a speed even Miss Fisher might have found impressive, but when he burst through the door, he was still barely in time to catch his ringing phone. An hour’s worth of conversation with Mr. Angelton and several more phone calls later, he met Doctor MacMillan at the morgue, feeling a vague forlorn hope that he might be confronted with a figure draped in fox fur, indelicately peering under the sheets at the corpses. But it was not to be. Instead, Mac greeted him brusquely with a stack of folders, a body on a gurney behind her.

“You found her already?” He asked, surprised.

The doctor shook her head. She drew back the sheet to expose a badly fish-eaten corpse with odd patchy stains across the face and the majority of its hair missing, as if the girl had been shaved before being dumped. “She’s just the latest that we can’t identify. Dragged out of the bay two days ago, looks to have been submerged for the right amount of time after being inexpertly stabbed, possibly to death. I’ve gone through every youthful Jane Doe we’ve had since two weeks before the Grants and their charges left port two months ago. That gives us seventeen bodies to try and connect with one of your five girls.”

“Seventeen against five?” Jack shook his head. “That’s too many. We’re going to need to narrow it down somehow.” He pulled his own folder out of his coat and laid it on the table next to Mac’s pile. “Angelton gave me a description of all the girls, and I pulled as much information as I could about the families from our records. It was a thin set of files, and he grumbled in dissatisfaction. “As far as I can tell, good girls, good families. Not much in the papers about them, or the Grants for that matter.” He turned over the first packet. “Elizabeth-Anne Galloway, sixteen. Family is respectable, solidly middle-class. Three siblings, all younger. Father in the haberdashery business. Dark-haired, stocky build, various chicken pox scars, missing her adult canines – apparently, they never came in. She had a false set made just for the trip.”

Mac waved her hand dismissively. “That would definitely ring a bell if I’d seen that body. But we can send a telegram to Phryne to check the girls’ teeth if it helps. Next candidate.” Jack gave a sudden huff of laughter at the image of Miss Fisher playing dentist, but continued through his packet.

“Hazel Millerton. Youngest girl, aged fifteen. Dark-haired, light-eyed, and slender. Orphan under guardianship via a grandmama in Wales. Trip was her first foray into wider world, but she’s done a bit of charitable work at home that’s made the papers.” He tossed the file down. “Hasn’t lived enough to have many identifying marks, I’m afraid, other than pierced ears.”

“Fortunate girl,” Mac replied. “Who else is there?”

“Adeline King, sixteen.” This file was another slim one. “Youngest of four, father knows the Grants socially. Brunette, lanky, and a bit plain. There’s a photo of this one from the paper – she’s won a couple of academic prizes from her school.” Mac nodded approvingly.

“Can always use more intelligent girls. Let’s hope she’s not one of these.” She patted her stack of autopsy reports somberly.

“Next is Louisa Green. Daughter of Grant’s business partner. Her parents are touring on the continent and unavailable for a description, so I spoke with her guardian. Turns eighteen in two months. Fair, tall and athletic with a, quote, ‘unfashionable shape and a penchant for trouble.’”

“Sounds like the guardian is a bit less than doting.”

“I rather got the impression Miss Green was a handful they were grateful to pass along.”

“Eighteen-year-old-girls often are. Next?”

“Desdemona Lawrence-Parkes, sixteen. Also fair-haired and quite tall, with brown eyes. Marks from a dog attack on her legs. Mother is a widow, sent her on the trip with life insurance money from the father’s passing. She has one older brother, who did show up a few times in our records on theft charges, as well as three younger siblings.”

“Plausible,” said Mac. “I have a couple of these who might fit that description, and dog bites could easily look like other damage to an abused corpse. Further, a widowed mother with several other children to wrangle might be less likely to notice if her daughter’s telegrams seemed a bit off.”

“That’s the thing that puzzles me,” said Robinson. “How did nobody notice that one of the girls was an impostor until now?”

“Maybe Angleton and Grant are wrong?” Mac's dismissive shrug indicated just how likely she thought that was.

“His evidence is a little thin, but I don’t think he’s barking up the wrong tree. He listed a considerable number of Grant’s business dealings that have been undercut or fallen through unexpectedly.” Mac busied herself with her records, only partially listening. “The timings are too close to be coincidental, and Grant and Angleton have both seen telegrams sent from the ship that indicate insider knowledge of his dealings, including, in one case, of a discussion that was held in the suite on the ship between Grant and his wife. Only the girls on the trip could have conceivably overheard, the maid having been on an errand at the time. With it happening more than once, they’ve both grown deeply concerned. And if they were all genuine, they would have no motivation to dabble in sabotage.” Robinson shook his head. “Angelton suspects a Communist sweetheart, but that stretches plausibility, given the traveling. How would a girl on her own even pull this off? ”

“I don’t have an answer for you, Inspector.” Mac rifled through the papers impatiently, looking for possibilities. “But let’s keep looking and maybe we can narrow down our ‘who’ and you can focus on the ‘how’ later.”

“Fair enough,” he replied. He fought back a depressed sigh. He needed Collins. He missed Phryne. But he still had a job to do.

\---

Dot, having finally, finally persuaded Hugh that yes, darling, even newlyweds do, in fact, spend a little time apart when they vacation, settled into the desk chair with a pile of Miss Phryne’s mail in front of her. This hadn’t exactly been the plan, of course, but between the Baron getting kidnapped and her getting shot at and everything in between, she and Miss Phryne had agreed in the car on the way to the wedding that it would be easiest to just pack a few things for her to keep the detecting business ticking over while they were both away. Miss Phryne had taken her gun and her burgling clothes and her lockpicks and so on, and Dot had taken the mail and made her employer promise to send a telegram when she reached England. Dot found this a more than equitable trade, all things considered.

The job was beyond simple at this point in her career as Miss Fisher’s companion. Invitations were to be regretfully declined, appeals for charitable works to be assessed by Dot, who had also been given a rather substantial discretionary fund by her employer, and requests for detecting help to be redirected to other resources in the city. But today, there was only a single letter in a battered envelope amidst the flyers and cards.

 _Dear Ms Fishe,_ it read. _My pup has gon missing n Paddy sez you detect fr Collingwood kids fr a discont. I saw he was tooken up by a man in a fansee bloo car wot had a birdy on it, so he didn just go wandring, and we kent find nobody who seen him sence too months ago. In heer shoud be the first bit of pay fr you. Thank you. Christine Camberwell_

Dot felt inordinately touched by the contents of the grubby letter. Folded up with it was a handful of pennies and a remarkably well-drawn picture of a curly-tailed black dog with floppy ears. She gave the picture a stroke with her thumb, remembering a little terrier she had owned when she and her sister Nell were small, and how devastated they had both been when Roo had disappeared. As she considered the matter, there was a thumping on the stairs, and Hugh rushed into the room with all the finesse of a brick through a window, panting for breath. “Hugh, Hugh what on earth is the matter?”

“Jane…” he gasped. “Miss Fisher went to Greece and Jane is in trouble and I think we might need to hurry home sooner than we thought.”

“That’s terrible Hugh, but why would we need to go home?” Dot was reeling less than she would have expected. But then, this was Miss Phryne. Doing the unexpected and unladylike thing was rather what she did.

“Well Dottie....” he paused, and she could just see him puffing his chest out a hair. “I am a Senior Constable now.”

“Yes, but why would we need to go home?”

“Mr. Butler says there’s a connection with a likely missing girl from the area, and knowing the Inspector, he's going to need someone to help him run down the details. He's not going to leave it in the hands of someone else if Jane or Miss Fisher is in trouble.”

“You make an excellent point, Senior Constable Collins.” Dot nodded decisively, a little smile hovering on her lips. “But, if you’re going to be working long hours combing through records and interviewing people, you’re going to want to come home to a hot meal cooked by Mrs. Collins, and our cottage kitchen isn’t set to be finished for another five days.” She smiled up at him and he felt his breath catch a little. “And Miss Fisher did say that we were more than welcome to use her house if anything came up in that line.”

“Oh Dottie, I don’t know that we should take advantage.” But she could see him already considering it. And preening a little more at the thought of his wife cooking for him in Miss Fisher’s modern kitchen.

“She put new furniture in the larger guest room, just on the off chance,” she added. “She practically insisted.” Dot jumped up and began shaking out their clothes in preparation for folding into suitcases. It had been a calculated risk, but almost since the day he had proposed, Dot had been considering how to persuade Hugh that they could make it work while they both pursued their respective careers. A good long look at just how very nice it was to have a wife employed by the generous Miss Fisher might push him from grudging to enthusiastic acceptance of the fact that she was keeping her job. And perhaps a little investigating of a missing puppy – a nice, easy, safe job like the missing Spanish Ambassador’s kitten one – would reassure him that it wasn’t all danger and shadows and being shot at. Dot hoped, anyway.

\---

Phryne had landed her Moth in the Athens airport with less than her usual finesse, and it galled her. Her co-pilot, a lithe, swarthy fellow named Georgio, had been an excellent flier, but hardly the company she really wanted on a breakneck flight that had kept her on tenterhooks of anxiety for nearly 60 solid hours, with the bare minimum of sleep when they landed to refuel. She dragged herself out of the cockpit in a temper that would have been explosive if she weren’t so exhausted.

“Ah, excuse me, are you the Hon. Miss Fisher?” came a voice from the edge of the runway. It was a man in a fawn hat, holding a bundle of telegrams. _Oh excellent,_ she thought with bitter sarcasm. _Let me guess, they’ve moved on to Cairo._ But she swallowed down that remark and merely held up a curt hand in greeting as Georgio bumped down behind her. The cheers that greeted him showed he was clearly known here just as well as he had boasted. “Miss Fisher,” the man with her mail repeated, drawing nearer. “I have a packet of messages for you, and a car is waiting to take you to the Hotel Artemisia.”

“Thank Heaven,” she said, meaning it. “If someone can collect my things from Rigel and wheel her to the hangar?” She was filthy with exhaust, tired beyond belief, and seething with pent-up anxiety for Jane. She wasn’t certain she could cope with anything much besides a bath and a cat nap before going out to hunt down her adopted daughter. Flight helmet in hand, Phryne dragged herself into the back of a rather nice cab while the man lashed her baggage to it. She watched Rigel safely into the hangar, then opened her stack of mail.

The first was Mr. Butler’s message again, forwarded by her previous stop in Aleppo, which would have been the last leg before Southampton. The next several were welcome notes from acquaintances that were in the area. If she needed to bring social pressure to bear for some reason, they would be a place to start. The next was a heavy envelope of fine linen-paper, with a G embossed on the seal. Kitty or Steven? She nearly tore the thing in half as the car lurched forward toward the gate of the airport.

 _Dear Miss Fisher,_ it read. _I am desperately sorry for the trouble and anxiety you must have gone through when you received Jane’s telegram. I had been hoping to communicate to you myself, but have only recently been able to compose something acceptable to the military guarding us. Jane and the rest of our charges are all here in Athens now and have been allowed to stay in the hotel with me._ “Military-enforced house arrest,” Phryne murmured. “Well, that’s unfortunate.” _Kitty, however, has been imprisoned for nearly two weeks, and my Greek, while passable, is not enough to penetrate the legal system._ “Even more unfortunate,” she added. Her Greek at its best had been schoolroom and stilted. Now, years later, she doubted she could do much more than pay her bill at the hotel. She kept reading, but was surprised when the letter switched to French. Her addled brain took a long moment to puzzle it out. Not only was it of questionable fluency, but Steven was writing obliquely. _Forgive me, my Phryne. I can only hope the constabulary can’t parse French well. I’ve told them it’s because you’re my mistress and my wife can’t read this language. In any case, your dear girl has run them ragged. She is brilliant, and has been my right hand through all of this. One of the other girls, however, has made a beau of someone with rosy sympathies, and the authorities have scooped up Kitty in an attempt to squeeze us out. There is other business too, but I will not bore you. I’ve spoken with my agent, who has spoken with the Victorian department, and they have promised to see what they can find on their end. It’s all too complicated for me, my dear._ Here, he switched back to English. _Please, come to us at the Hotel Artemisia at your earliest convenience. With affection, Steven Winthrop Grant._

As they bumped over the bridge that connected the airport road to the larger streets, Phryne breathed raggedly. The hotel was close, and being berthed there would allow her to see Jane, which would in turn allow her to actually sleep when she collapsed in a bed. Feeling as if the weight of the cab had rolled off her back, she turned to the last envelopes, both telegrams. She scanned through the top message. It was from the doctor and the inspector collectively, outlining the possibility of an imposter girl under the Grant’s care, and what identifying features she could use to check them. She read the whole of it three times before pocketing it. There was a second, much shorter, telegram underneath.

_Sending you letter STOP Hope you stay in place long enough to receive STOP If not will have to chase you down STOP Jack_

A thick lump arose in her throat at the last word. She wondered just how many drafts he’d gone through at the telegraph office before sending this. “Oh Inspector,” she whispered. “I don’t make things easy for you, do I?” But she couldn’t help a smile creeping across her face as her hand floated up to caress the small enameled bird pinned to her scarf. She drowsed the rest of the way to the hotel, with the remembrance of his lips on hers soothing her nerves immensely.


	3. A Day of Arrivals

When Phryne awoke, it was with a jolt as someone knocked on the window of her cab. “Miss Fisher? Miss Fisher!”

“Jane?” Phryne was up and out of the cab like a shot, throwing her arms around Jane without regard to how badly she felt and smelled. “Oh Jane, I was so worried.” She pressed her daughter away to look her over from head to toe, but no injuries were visible. To the contrary, Jane appeared in excellent spirits. She had grown a couple of inches while she’d been away, thinning out her face, though a thick sprinkling of freckles indicated quite a lot of sunshine exposure, and her hair was no longer down in plaits, but drawn up into a more grown-up and sophisticated style, with a silver pin through it. Her stylish apricot frock was new – clearly something she’d purchased herself – and showed both restraint and good taste. “Are you alright? I’m so glad I got here in good time.”

“I’m fine Miss, more than fine.” Her face was a little drawn, as if she hadn’t slept completely well, but her eyes were alight with happiness at seeing her adoptive mother. “I’ve been helping Mr. Grant while Mrs. Grant is…away and the maid, Theresé, too.” She glanced behind her, and Phryne noticed for the first time a pair of men glaring daggers at Jane. Jane acknowledged them with a nod. “We can talk inside – they get nervous if I stay in the courtyard too long.” In Greek, (Greek! Phryne marveled) Jane called over a porter, gave him directions on where to take the bags, and suddenly she was being led into a lovely Grecian hotel, onto a plush elevator, out into a lushly carpeted corridor, and up to the door of a suite with the number 21 in gleaming brass letters. “Now,” Jane said softly, with an air of complete confidence and competency, “We’re not allowed out of the hotel without our guards, but Mr. Grant and I have persuaded them that you pose no concern to national security whatsoever.” The skulking pair now lurking a few doorways away seemed to bely that, but Phryne nodded all the same. “So, you probably shouldn’t announce your profession, and if you want it to be at all private, you should use French, but other than that, it will be fine.”

“Well then Jane,” Phryne said fondly. “You seem to have things well in hand, so I am going to have a bath and a rest, and meet you in the dining room for dinner.” She squeezed her hand hard, then drew her in for another embrace. “Oh, my dear Jane.” When they let go, a tear danced in Jane’s eye, and a few more had dropped, silently, from Phryne’s eyes into her daughter’s hair. Oh, it was good to see Jane. She slipped the key into the lock, but watched Jane down the hall until she regained the elevator. Then, and only then, did she enter to inspect the room.

It was a small but elegantly furnished trio of rooms done in silver and green, sitting room in front, bedroom further back, and bathroom with, oh thank heavens, a large soaking tub with a bath already drawn and freshened with pine salts. For her foresight, Jane was definitely getting an increase in her allowance. A maid was just leaving, having folded and put away the last stitch of clothing from the two suitcases that had been crammed into the plane. Phryne stuffed a banknote into the woman’s hand as the she scurried from the room. Phryne staggered to the bathroom, shedding clothes haphazardly, and all but flung herself into the tub. As she sank into the fragrant water, she decided in a languorous and muddled sort of way that combining the bath and the nap into one would probably save her quite a bit of time, all things considered. She would send Jack a telegram after.

\---

When Dot and Hugh arrived at Miss Fisher’s house, it was coming on dinnertime, and Hugh’s stomach was rumbling loud enough to be heard over the noise of the cab. He and Dot piled out, with their bags beside them, and he took a good long look up at the cream stucco trimmed with ocher, as if he’d never looked properly at 221b before. “You know Dottie,” he said. “It really is a very nice house.”

“I’ve loved living here,” she replied, with just a shade of wistfulness in her voice. “But our house is going to be lovely too, and Miss Fisher has promised to raise my salary providing everything goes smoothly while she’s away.” Hugh gaped a little.

“A raise? Even though you’ll be moving out and your hours will be reduced? Even though she might be gone for a year or more?”

“Yes Hugh,” she said, hefting her bags as Mr. Butler came out to greet them. “She depends on me. She offered to buy me a bicycle to make the trip easier too. Though I don’t quite know how I feel about that yet. She originally suggested a motorcycle." Dot shuddered at the thought.

“Good evening Constable, Mrs. Collins,” said Mr. Butler with a smile. “Welcome back. There’s dinner on the table in the kitchen, and Miss Fisher sent a message that you are to enjoy the guest rooms as guests, and not to feel you are importuning in the slightest.” In point of fact, she had delivered that particular message before ever leaving, but the collusion was all for a good cause. Hugh sighed appreciatively and practically sprinted into the house despite being laden with more than half the luggage, while Mr. Butler and Dot proceeded toward the door with the rest at a slightly more leisurely pace. Mr. Butler smiled indulgently after the lad, which gave Dot her opening.

“Mr. Butler,” she began tentatively, “Do you think Miss Fisher would mind terribly if I took on a case for her? It seems quite simple. And,” she paused, then forged ahead determinedly. “And I think Hugh needs to see that everything is going to be just fine.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind in the slightest, Dorothy,” the older man replied. “Husbands and wives always need a little time to adjust to each other, and keeping busy is the best way to have something to converse about at the end of the day.” Hugh came loping back out of the house as Mr. Butler spoke, an abashed look on his face.

“I’m sorry Dottie, let me carry that for you, I wasn’t thinking…” She held up a hand, laughing.

“Hugh Collins, I can perfectly well carry my own case. But you can make it up to me by carrying me in, if you like?” A slight blush suffused his face, but he willingly scooped her up and carried her over the threshold.

“There!” He said proudly, setting her down on the kitchen floor as if she were Delft china. “Now, could we eat? Please?”

\---

Jack was finally leaving for the night. He and the doctor had sent an absolutely enormous telegram to Miss Fisher hours ago, outlining everything they’d gleaned. The station accountant was probably going to have a fit about them sending a case file’s worth of words. But there wasn’t nearly enough for him to have gained any traction. His wristwatch said it was past 1am, so why was he still here anyway? Surely, he wasn’t going to be any more effective at this point than he would be after some sleep, a wash and something from the pie cart. Communists and wrongful imprisonments and impostor art students and possibly a kidnapped or murdered girl. It had all turned into an impenetrable slurry, so he had resolved to head home and start fresh the next morning. But as he turned the corner, he was nearly bowled over by a delivery boy. “Sorry Guv, telegram for the police!”

“Wait, wait, I’m the police,” he said, flashing his credentials. “Who’s it for?”

“DI Robinson, sir! Said it was urgent.” The boy tugged his cap nervously, but Jack merely tossed the boy a coin.

“Thank you, that would be me.” He tore it open, wondering who on earth was sending telegrams in the dead of night.

_Hello Jack STOP_ Oh. That’s who. _Heading to dinner armed with your descriptions STOP Also pistol STOP Looking for red rose STOP Am impressed with your diligence STOP Jane sends chairetísmata STOP I send kisses STOP Hope that makes your eyebrows do interesting things STOP Phryne_

A red rose would be their conspirator on the Greek side, he supposed. He let out a bark of laughter, alone on the sidewalk in the light of the station. Interesting things indeed. And then, a new idea presented itself. It wasn’t fully-formed, but it might coalesce after a bit of a walk home. And possibly a kip. During which, perhaps, he could let his brain expand on the idea of kisses from Miss Fisher and whatever might come after. That would be a more than acceptable use of his sleeping time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chairetísmata is Greek for greetings or salutations. Jane is showing off a tiny bit for Jack.


	4. A Bouquet of Maidens

Phryne was regretting immensely that she had brought such minimal luggage with her on her flight. The plan had been to stay in flying togs until safely depositing her father at home, then buy herself a fabulous new wardrobe from whomever tickled her fancy. But plans changing as they had, she was down to a single evening dress, hopefully appropriate for a warm evening in a hotel restaurant while meeting an old friend’s husband who was unwittingly harboring a potential Communist agent from the Greek authorities. Still, she thought, as she swept through the doors, she was doing her best under the circumstances.

“My dear Miss Fisher!” There was Steven, rising to greet her, instantly recognizable in a charcoal suit that had once matched his hair. He looked upset and anxious. Even in the relative safety of a corner of the small dining room, his eyes darted back and forth between doors, windows, and the handful of people enjoying their meals. But his manners had not deserted him. “Fresh off a plane, and you look blossomingly lovely. I’m not surprised in the slightest.” He took her hand in his as she came up to him, kissing it thoroughly enough to confirm even the most suspicious of his silent guards that this was indeed a mistress. Her dress had come through quite well. It was long and silvery-blue, with turquoise and jade beads in exquisite curlicue patterns on the bodice. Her long sliver gloves were decorated with spangles at the bicep, to better coordinate with the gown and matching handbag, and she’d covered her hair with a turban in the same fabric, adorned with peacock feather tips that had been short enough to survive the crush of the flight. But the gloves and the turban were hot, covering her still-waterlogged hands, and the white leather shoes, she thought to herself, might be a liability if there were going to be any escapades tonight. She felt unreasonably cross as Steven drew her down to sit next to him.

“But where are your lovely charges?” She asked, looking around. “I was expecting we’d all be dining together.”

“They are on their way,” Steven replied. “They are escorted down one at a time since…” he leaned close to her as if to kiss her neck. “Since Jane ‘wandered’ away and sent her telegram,” he whispered. She gave him a beaming smile, and he wobbled a little under the wattage of it. The poor man had clearly been through the wringer. Backwards. Twice. Steven Grant was a precise man, but that had never extended to his dress habits in the best of times. Now, with Kitty locked up, his greying dark hair was barely combed, his shoes and cufflinks both were mismatched, and his moustache was in dire need of a trim. He slumped into her with an affection that was composed of equal parts fondness and exhaustion. Phryne had been the means of introducing him to Kitty, and he was clearly missing her terribly.

“Now,” she said. “I have an excellent view of the doors, so why don’t you introduce me as the girls come through.” He nodded and sat up straighter as the first girl, escorted by one of the same lurking men as before, came through the doors.

“Louisa Green,” he said. “Daughter of Louis Green, my overseas partner in the shipping business.” She strode forward, extending her hand.

“Lover of art, music, travel adventures and general mischievery,” she added with a confident, sunny smile. The skirt of her yellow and white dress swirled around her, putting Phryne in mind that she was wearing a daisy. It certainly matched her golden hair. “Are you the adventuress Miss Fisher? Jane was so cagey about you – we had to drag it out of her how you drove an ambulance in the war and gunned down anarchists holding up a bank and flew a plane all over the world and all that.” Phryne gestured for her to sit.

“I've had some adventures, yes,” she said to the eager girl, deflecting. “Which is why I was so keen that Jane get to go on some adventures of her own. You shall have to tell me about some of this general mischievery that you get up to as well. But who is this now, Steven?”

“Hazel Millerton,” he said, as a short, pixieish, girl with an olive complexion was escorted up to the table. She wore a yellowish frock that looked rather too young for her, with black hair in plaits, and had an irritated scowl on her face that was only magnified by a glare from Louisa. “She and her friend Laurel were supposed to both come, but Laurel came down sick, which is why we offered Jane her place on such short notice.” Phryne observed the girl with interest. According to that ridiculously expensive telegram, Hazel was small for her age, prone to asthma, and had pierced ears. But her ears were covered by the plaits, and Phryne sat back, disappointed for the moment. Steven’s smile had taken on a slightly fixed quality.

“Adeline’s down next, Mr. Grant,” Hazel put in as she sat down. Louisa, whose face had unaccountably dropped, made grudging room. “The other girls are all _disorganized_ ,” she added pointedly. “Can I order Psaropilafo Tis Kivelis, since I’m not?”

“Yes, Hazel, that will be perfectly fine.” Steven’s face suggested for an instant that she had perhaps been ordering quite a lot of fish and garlic rice over the protests of the rest of the table lately. “Adeline King,” he added. The next girl, a mousy brunette with long eyelashes and an unbecoming peach frock, was advancing hesitantly, shyness at the elegant Phryne written all over her face. “Adeline is our budding linguistics expert, though Jane is not far behind.” Her hands were ink-stained and soft, but her handshake was firm. Either some excellent coaching, or a father in business, Phryne surmised. The telegram had indicated he was a land agent.

The fourth girl proved to be a sunburnt Elizabeth-Anne: “Oh, just Lizzy, please. Like in Jane Austen, you know,” Galloway. Her canine teeth, if they truly were false, were expertly done. She was clearly the disorganized one Hazel had been referring to; her bracelet was on inside-out, the lace of her shawl likely belonged to a different dress, and one shoe was done up crookedly. But her round face was open and cheerful, with a squint that suggested she’d left her glasses in their room out of vanity, and a few brown curls escaping charmingly from the lily comb she'd done her hair with.

Jane and Desdemona entered together, having been shepherded down by the aggravated soldiers. The two were arm-in-arm, Desdemona in iris purple, Jane still in apricot. Desdemona's fair hair was a shade lighter than Jane's but it was done in the same tidy style, and it looked like Jane might have lent her a pair of shoes as well, since Phryne recognized them as ones she'd bought Jane for the trip. The taller of the two soldiers made to push Jane into the dining room, but was stopped by Phryne striding forward to meet them. “Jane, ma petit!” She positioned herself between the two girls and the annoyed man, and smoothly moved them toward the table. “We were just beginning to think of ordering. How has your day been?” Jane squeezed Phryne’s hand appreciatively as she nodded to the others. “Uneventful. The solicitor for Mrs. Grant called as we were about to come down, and I took down the message for you, Mr. Grant.” She passed the little slip of paper to him, and, once Phryne was settled back down next to him, he slid it to her under cover of the tablecloth.

 _Fish,_ Kitty’s pet name for her. Fish and Kit. Phryne suppressed a nostalgic sigh. _Fish, do you remember Pearl Street where I met you? When you come see me, bring me the book from there._ Pearl Street? They had met in a fistfight over a shilling that had been dropped outside the cathedral. Phryne resolved to check Kitty’s jewelry box as soon as she had the chance. Her friend wasn’t much of a reader, but she had a predilection for pretty things, just as Phryne did, and kept meticulous inventory to boot. And Phryne knew exactly where she would have hidden the key, as well. It was a trick Kit had taught Fish – to hide something by attaching it to a cork, then using it to cork a filled dark bottle. Even an alcoholic father searching for drink wasn’t likely to open his daughter’s bottle of hair oil to see if she’d hidden a pound note in it. She’d have to teach Jane that one, if Kitty hadn’t already.

She leant into her chair as the food arrived, observing the girls keenly. Jane and Desdemona were evenly matched, debating back and forth about the age of a sculpture in the lobby. Adeline was tentative at breaking into their conversation, but when she did, it was with a factual authority to which the pair respectfully deferred. Hazel and Lizzy were arguing in low voices about something, possibly the bracelet around Lizzy’s wrist, then about the fish that Hazel had ordered and Lizzy clearly hated. Louisa was carrying on a lighthearted conversation with the waiter when he passed by, and Mr. Grant when he wasn’t, doing her level best to draw Phryne into a discussion of some of her purported derring-do. She was clearly the most expansive personality, and comfortable with the male sex. Louisa might be the most likely to have a beau, and even a charming, prepossessing girl of almost eighteen could fall victim to the charms of a roguish foreigner.

When dessert arrived, “Oh Hazel, just try something different for once!” Phryne rose delicately.

“Excuse me ladies, but which way might I go to powder my nose?” Jane leapt up at once, followed by Adeline.

“I’ll show you Miss Fisher,” she said. “It’s a bit of a twisty way to find.” The three made their way out of the dining room and back toward the kitchen. Once they had reached the relative quiet of the hallway, Adeline looked down at her shoes and blushed.

“I’m sorry Miss,” she said. “I…I don’t like leaving the table alone.” She dragged one shoe on the carpet in awkward half-circles.

“No trouble, Adeline, you may go first.” Phryne stood back to allow her to go in, then leaned forward so Jane could catch her low tone. “Mrs. Grant wants her jewelry inventory. It should be in a bottle of Pearl’s Hair Oil. If you can, get it to me. If not, I’ll burgle the room the next time you’re out. Shut a feather in the door so I know if you’re gone.”

Jane nodded, completely unruffled. “It shouldn’t be any problem to get it. The Grant’s maid has gone away, so it’s just the hotel staff and the two guards. They follow us around and make sure we don’t leave, and eavesdrop on everything.” She gave a little self-deprecating shrug. “You taught me how I can get into a jewelry box. The short one, Mateo, he said he would bring me down to visit you, since you are my guardian, so I’ll do it first thing.”

“Excellent work Jane,” she said, admiration in her voice. Jane blushed. High praise from the dashing Miss Phryne, indeed! “Any idea why she might want a record of her jewelry?” But before Jane could reply, there was the sound of fumbling with the lock from the other side of the door. “Tonight then, you come visit me, my dear. I want to hear about your trip!” Phryne said brightly as Adeline emerged. She and Jane would sort out this yet.

\---

Dot awoke the next morning in a determined state of mind. Hugh had left for the station early, pressing a kiss to her cheek as she lolled in the sinfully comfortable bed. But without him next to her, she had been restless, and without Miss Fisher to wait on, she had felt adrift. So, she had rolled out of bed, washed up, and gathered some toast and marmalade from the plate Mr. Butler had laid out. “Plans for the day, Dorothy?” he had asked.

“Well, Mr. Butler,” she ventured. “I’m going out on that case I told you about.” She opened her shorthand notebook to a fresh page, and pulled out the letter from Christine to show him. “It’s hardly a drug smuggling ring or a kidnapping or anything dramatic, but the poor girl has lost her dog, and maybe I can help. Paddy can point me to where to find her.” She heard her voice shake a little uncertainly, but when she looked up, Mr. B was practically beaming as he read the letter.

“Good for you Dorothy. Miss Fisher will appreciate that, I'm sure.” He returned the letter and patted her gently on the shoulder. “I’m inventorying the china today, then going into town to order some replacements, but let me know if I can assist you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Butler,” she said, and he moved away into the parlor. She felt vaguely nervous that he hadn’t sat down to review the facts with her, or even questioned her decision. He’d simply accepted it, and let her get on with her task. But, well, she had her starting point, and now she had to go gather some clues. Dot pocketed her notebook and the letter, and went off to look for her hat, the straw one with the brave pink and blue flowers. She was going detecting, and the first order of business was to interview Christine Camberwell about the fancy blue car with the bird on it.


	5. Bribery and Corruption

City South was bustling with activity, and had been since the moment Hugh had gone back on duty for his first shift as a married man. There had been a steady stream of complainants – two burglaries; four public intoxication and/or indecency charges; two reckless drivers of automobiles and one irresponsible operation of a bicycle; fifteen participants, witnesses, and victims from a dockyard brawl; and a missing persons case who was actually one of the public intoxicants drying out in a cell. Senior Constable Collins found he was sweating slightly as he sagged down into his chair while filling out the stack of paperwork. He and the Inspector had barely exchanged twenty words beyond initial greetings and requests for forms to be passed back and forth as Robinson flew in and out with stacks of paper like a swallow building a nest. He wondered idly what he was doing with all those files slowly piling up on his desk, but the thought fled at yet another jangle of the phone. “City South Police?”

“Constable Collins, this is Dr. MacMillan at the morgue.”

“Oh, yes, hello Doctor, what can I do for you?”

“Is the Inspector available?” Hugh looked up, but Inspector Robinson had sped down the hall moments before the phone rang.

“I’m er, afraid he’s just stepped out.”

“Very well, when he returns, tell him his hunch was right about the eyebrows, and that I’ll have more for him when the samples I sent to the college come back.” She hung up without a goodbye, and Collins dutifully took down the message, wondering if every day was going to be this frantic now that he’d been promoted. He turned back to the witness statements from the bicycle accident. He was certain he recognized the description from a similar incident a couple of weeks ago where a woman had been knocked down and robbed; perhaps there was a connection. Inspector Robinson breezed past him again, this time with what was apparently a report on a carjacking and a cable from somewhere near Perth.

“Inspector? Inspector?” He couldn’t be timid. He was Senior Constable. “Inspector!” he was practically shouting before Jack even seemed to hear him. “Sir, I have a message for you from Doctor MacMillan. And are you all right?”

“What?” Robinson finally looked up, shaking his head distractedly. “Yes, yes, I’m fine Collins. You’re doing an excellent job. You managed that herd from the dockyard well.” He turned as if he were hunting for something, but his eyes had already unfocused again.

Hugh tried again. “Sir, Doctor – er… Mac called.” That got through.

“Oh, oh, she did? What did she say?” Hugh handed over the sheet of paper, and watched the Inspector read it absently as he wandered into his office and shut the door. The front door swung open yet again, and he braced himself for another angry citizen, but instead, blessedly, it was Dottie. With a picnic basket that smelled of roast chicken and fresh bread. Oh, he loved being married.

“Hello Hugh,” she said, a happy glow suffusing her face. “I couldn’t ring through, so I brought you a little lunch.”

“Mrs. Collins, you are the best.” She proffered a bottle of lemonade and he opened and drained it in a single motion, then took her free hand in his and kissed it. “What can I do to thank you?”

“Well,” she said, “I was wondering if I might take a look at the vehicle identification books? I was thinking it might be useful if I knew more about cars, in case Miss Fisher ever has a case where she’d need to identify one.” She gave him her most beatific smile, like a Madonna surveying a congregation of nuns. Dutiful nuns. Very devout. Hugh probably should have known better.

“I don’t see why not,” he said after a moment’s astonishment that such a pretty woman could have married him. “There are two other constables out on the beat, so I don’t think anyone will be needing those books.” He dragged out two large books of photos and set them on the desk in front of him so she could page through but still be out of the way of any foot traffic.

“Would the Inspector like some food?”

“I would love some, Mrs. Collins.” Jack had emerged yet again, with a different file folder and an evidence box that he set down. “You’re too kind.” She passed him a bottle of lemonade and a plate, and laid out several dishes on the ledge behind the telephone. Both men dug in, and Dot retreated, victorious, returning inside holding the hand of a slightly overheated little girl in dire need of a scrub, a delousing, and a change of clothing.

“Now Christine, you just sit for a bit and cool off with some of this lemonade, and we’ll see if we can’t find a car you recognize in here.”

The Inspector and the Senior Constable looked at one another, down at the ragamuffin girl sitting politely in Dot’s lap, turning pages with a cautious hand, back at each other, then at the delicious spread behind them. In unison, they shrugged and turned back to the food. They were both highly principled men, but the smell of a fresh, free meal was quite persuasive. “At least she’s not pointing a gun at me this time,” Hugh said mildly, helping himself to a cherry biscuit. Dot pretended not to hear.

\---

At the same time that Dot was bribing two pillars of the Victorian Constabulary with lemonade, fresh bread, green beans almondine, and honey-glazed roast chicken stuffed with fig, her employer was passing a bribe of her own. It was absurdly early in Athens, but Jane had insisted the easiest way to get in to see Mrs. Grant would be to go in the daybreak hours when the more amenable Mateo was drowsing, and the less amenable Kostas was actually sleeping. Jane had crept down to Phryne’s room with an ease that spoke of practice, and together, the two of them had slipped through the wakening cobblestone streets to reach the jail where Kitty was being held. Stray cats scattered as they approached the squat brown building, which was hardly the kind of architecture Phryne associated with Greece. At the door, Jane had chatted easily with the forbiddingly iron-haired woman at the desk, introducing Phryne as the woman bringing some new clothes for Mrs. Grant. After a thorough check of the linen, which included a pair of banknotes that discreetly disappeared during the search, Phryne and Jane were allowed through to the cell where Mrs. Grant had been held for nearly two weeks.

“Fish!” Katherine Grant leapt up from the pallet where she had been lying and wriggled her arm through the narrow bars to take Phryne’s hand. “Fish, it’s you! You look as tired as I feel.”

“Oh Kit, my darling,” Phryne clasped her friend’s cold hand in her own. “The last time this happened, you were twelve and I was seven. I see the accommodations haven’t changed much.” The woman behind bars laughed, fingering the smears of dirt on her light brown skin. She was wearing a sprigged cyclamen linen dress and shoes that had been much abused, and the fading chestnut hair that usually would have been carefully curled and arranged was hanging limply, but the determined set to her jaw indicated that the Collingwood girl under the expensive clothes was well and truly present.

“Fish, it was not my idea, but it was better than the alternative.”

“How so?” Phryne leaned closer, and Jane drifted nonchalantly to the door to watch for the warden. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Athens was our third stop in Greece, but I’ve been feeling something was off since just after the first one, maybe even earlier. I was sure we were being followed, or perhaps just watched. The political climate is such that it wouldn’t be unheard of, but this felt different, Fish.”

She ticked off points on her fingers. “At least three different times, I saw a thin Greek man, not much older than a boy, with dark curly hair, a lanky gait like a pickpocket, and a broad face, lingering near our cabins on the boat or in the lobbies and stairwells at the hotels. The girls swear up, down, back, forward, and by the hair of their chinny-chin-chins that they didn’t invite him, but, well. Then, they all started fretting like gamblers before confession. Hazel and Lizzy fighting, Louisa taunting Adeline, Adeline quarreling with Jane and Desdemona, all of them arguing about Hazel’s dog. Poor Steven’s been a distracted mess, and four of his contracts were undercut, sometimes by mere tenths of a percentage. Then, the day we landed in Thessaloniki, there was a fray with the rooms we couldn’t sort out, and the girls were forced to share. One of the girls left the balcony door open during the day, and when we moved to the larger suite, I couldn’t find a few pieces of my jewelry. The whole thing was a mare’s nest.”

The admission clearly pained her. Kitty’s plans usually ran with precision of a Swiss clock. She looked up at Phryne, wringing the hem of her dress between her hands, revealing several torn fingernails where there was usually a fine manicure. She had worked so hard to prove she belonged in the upper crust, and then this mess. Phryne put out a comforting hand to her shoulder, seething with resentment for her friend. “Then, despite everything, it happened again at the next hotel, with the rooms, I mean, and the jewelry was all disarranged again. Before I could make a thorough search, the authorities swarmed into our rooms, and demanded to know which of us was colluding with the Communists and spreading propaganda across Greece. I couldn’t very well tell them about the young man without implicating one of the girls, so I told them to take me if they wanted to hold someone. They dragged me in, and then, a week later while they were shipping the rest of the group here, Theresé our maid disappeared. Steven hasn’t been allowed to leave the girls alone, so I’ve been cooling my heels and waiting them out.”

“Kit!” Her tone was half admiring, half appalled, but her friend merely shrugged.

“Well, if it’s a boy, Fish, it’s only a boy, and I’m not going to let a sixteen-year-old girl go through this for him. Not worth it in the slightest.” She huffed. “Though your delivery has stiffened my resolve quite a bit.”

“I’ll see what I can do about clearing this up. Steven has plenty to do, but I’m thinking we can have you out in time for dinner tomorrow.”

“In the meanwhile, where is my ledger?”

“Sewn, very badly I’m afraid, into the lining of your day coat by Jane and I last night. She said the lock on the box was sound, and it looked quite full when she opened it.”

“Thank you, Fish.” Kitty looked deeply relieved. “I’ll go through the whole list and see if I can recall what was missing and when I wore it last. It’s been bothering me.”

“Someone’s coming,” Jane hissed. Phryne straightened and patted her friend’s fingers reassuringly as they gripped the cell bars.

“Don’t fret, Kitty. I’ll find the boy and spring you in no time.” When the Warden rounded the corner, Miss Fisher and Jane were standing at attention, awaiting her, and Mrs. Grant was slumped a little less forlornly on her pallet, with her day coat pulled around her shoulders.

As they passed out of the jail and made their way back to the hotel, Phryne took a long look at her surroundings. The sun was sending blinding slices of light down the streets and between the chunky buildings, giving a dreamy chiaroscuro quality to the morning. Of the handful of people on the street, a few boys fit the vague description Kitty had given her. But, simply being male, young, dark-haired, olive-complected, and thin was not going to be enough for her to have Mateo and Kostas drag someone down to the hotel for an interrogation. However, as they approached the drive of the building, another person caught her eye.

A figure in a long coat and a battered men’s hat was leaning on the railing of the dining patio, and as Phryne watched, something small and shiny dropped from their hand into the landscaping. Then, in a blink, the person whirled and darted inside. “Jane, did you see that?”

“Yes, Miss, but who was it? I don’t recognize the hat or jacket, so it couldn’t have been Mateo or Kostas.” Jane sped her walk to match Miss Fisher’s, hoping to catch a glimpse through the windows of the mystery person, but they were too late. "Although it maybe was that mystery boy that Mrs. Grant saw?"

“It was girl who did that, Jane,” Phryne replied as they arrived at the patio. “I saw tall-heeled gray women’s shoes under that coat. And,” she added, rifling through the mulch bed, “she dropped this.” It was a small, plain silver disc, with a loop at the top for a chain, a bent jump ring with a few red and black threads caught on it, and the block initial ‘L’ carved into it on one side.

“Is it a clue, Miss?” Jane asked, a little breathlessly.

“Yes, Jane, it most definitely is.”


	6. Not an Accident

By the time breakfast time arrived, Phryne had made more telephone calls than she ever cared to again. Social pressure was tough to bring to bear in a case of actual imprisonment, but since the idionymon law was so new, her solicitor, in conjunction with a connection at the Embassy, was able to discover some problems with Kitty’s being held and a tentative assurance of her release. In addition, Phryne had managed to get another message through from Jack.

_Found promising body STOP Drowned mutilated bleached hair eyebrows STOP Not Galloway likely not Green STOP Definitely murder STOP Well done finding trouble from another continent STOP DI Robinson_

Her response hadn’t been easy to send, as the operator was less fluent in English than Greek, but she was fairly certain there were going to be some red ears on the Inspector when it finally crossed the Indian Ocean. Possibly the wire might catch flame as well, but that’s why they put the things underwater anyway. And what, exactly, did it signify that the corpse’s hair had been bleached? To conceal the identity of the body, or to see if the double would pass in other respects? She wondered if Louisa used peroxide to obtain that golden shade in her hair. Jack had ruled out Lizzy, but if the body was as abused as it sounded, perhaps Louisa was still a possibility.

Breakfast was a rather breathless affair. Jane and Steven both clung to Phryne as soon as she entered the room, while Mateo and Kostas irritatedly ferried the other girls back and forth between the dining room and the rest of the hotel. First, Desdemona had forgotten to feed the pug, Hercules, then Hazel needed her gloves, then Adeline, her book. When Adeline came down, a worried look was etched on her face. “Desdemona, did you actually see Hercules when you put his food out for him?”

The willowy girl turned a fearful face to the group. “I…no, I thought he was sleeping in our room.”

“He wasn’t in there!” Hazel cried. “I didn’t see him – are you sure you shut the door properly?” Her voice was not soft and several other guests had looked around with interest which even good manners could not mask entirely. The question triggered a near-instant row, which only ended when Phryne clapped her hands.

“Ladies!” They turned as one, abashed. Adeline was flushed red with defending herself, Desdemona threatening tears, while Lizzy had upset her plate of breakfast into her lap. “Please compose yourselves.” The opportunity was perfect. “Jane, if you could?” With her daughter translating to the two guards, Phryne directed Steven to stay in the dining room with Adeline, who wanted nothing to do with the dog. Kostas would escort Hazel and Louisa around the lobby, Mateo would look after Desdemona as she searched on the second floor, and Phryne and Jane would escort Lizzy back to the room on the third floor to search there and allow her to change. They hastened upstairs, Phryne sweeping ahead, her billowing trousers and patterned shawl screening Lizzy from view.

“Now, Jane,” she said. “You help Lizzy change, and I will search.” Jane nodded soberly and closed the door behind her. The suite was much larger than her own, and Phryne wished intensely for Dot. This suite was three bedrooms, a sitting room and a bathroom, with the adjoining door linking a similar setup on the other side. She peered in. One room was clearly the Grants’, while the other held Jane’s clothes. Jane had mentioned sharing the bathroom with Adeline, so that left Lizzy, Hazel, Desdemona and Louisa in the side of the suite she stood in. By the time Lizzy had emerged with a new outfit on – Jane had persuaded her to put on gloves and brush her hair afresh as well, to keep the lily clip in – Phryne had given Hazel and Desdemona’s room a thorough enough toss to become coated in dog fur, and checked every piece of Louisa’s luggage without result. A single letter wadded into the bottom of the wastepaper basket piqued her interest, and she pocketed it for later review.

“Ah, Lizzy, before we go down, I’ve looked around in here, but not next door. Care to help? I don’t want to interfere with anyone’s things.” Jane made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a choked-back chuckle, but Lizzy was all in earnest.

“Certainly, Miss Fisher,” she said, smoothing her fresh skirt nervously. The three searched in and under all the furniture, but the dog was nowhere to be found. Phryne didn’t expect Hercules to be in Adeline’s jewelry box or the Grants’ bedding, but it didn’t hurt to check while Lizzy looked on the balconies and in the bathroom. Search complete, they made their way back downstairs, but were interrupted by a scream.

“That’s Louisa,” Lizzy wailed, and the three broke into a run toward the stairwell. Jane rounded the corner first and clattered down one flight, followed by Phryne and Lizzy clinging to them both in a fright. Adeline was lying on her side in the stairwell perilously close to the top step of the next flight, one hand tangled in the metal spindles, a trickle of blood seeping from her nose, while Louisa stood over her, screaming uselessly. As Phryne knelt down, Hazel and Kostas came running from the elevator. Adeline’s eyes were open, but unfocused, and Phryne pressed a handkerchief to the girl’s bleeding nose. A shining pink bruise was rising on her cheekbone, and she whimpered and began to cry as Phryne lifted her up.

“Jane,” she said, meaning to send her to fetch Mr. Grant and the others, but even as she spoke, she heard the clatter of running feet. Louisa had managed to alert half the hotel, it seemed. Mateo, Desdemona, Steven, two maids, and the concierge were all invading the stairs, and the few guests who had not left for the day already were peeking their heads around their doorframes. Jane moved to Louisa and laid a hand on the older girl’s shoulder. She had stopped screaming, but was panting heavily with shock.

“She’s all right, afti einai entaxei!” Jane called, waving the maids and the guests away. The concierge bustled up, fluttering his hands in concern.

“She has had a fall,” Phryne explained to him, interrupting any speeches. “I will take her to her room and clean her up, it’s no trouble.” Steven was quietly gathering the girls to him, to take them along too, but at a glare from Miss Fisher, he suddenly changed tacks, and began guiding them down to the hotel lounge, his arm gingerly around Louisa’s shoulders. Jane intercepted a meaningful nod that meant _see if they say anything_ and fell in line with the docility of a lamb. The two guards seemed torn, but Phryne gave them a charming smile as she strode past them with Adeline on her arm. Once inside the Grant’s rooms, the poor girl began to cry in earnest.

“Oh, Miss Fisher,” she wailed.

“Hush, hush, you’re safe in here.” She sat the girl on the chaise, and supplied her with a rinsed handkerchief while she inspected the girl’s injuries. “What happened Adeline? I thought you were staying in the dining room with Mr. Grant?”

“I… I felt bad. About not caring about Hercules. I thought I would come upstairs and tell Desdemona when I had seen him last.” She went to scrub her eyes, pressed the bruise on her cheek by accident, and winced. “And when I came up the stairs, I... tripped and fell.” Phryne shook her head.

“Adeline, I may not be the police, but I know when someone is lying to me. You most certainly did not trip forward, bang the side of your face and your nose at the same time, and wind up lying on your back facing the opposite way, with your fingers wrenched in the railing spindles, a hairsbreadth from breaking your neck in a tumble backwards down the stairs.” Adeline’s lips trembled and grew tight, and more tears spilled from her face. She shook her head wretchedly. “Something is very wrong here, and I think someone did this to you.”

Adeline drooped, but shook her head again defiantly. “It was an accident. I stumbled and the door to the stairwell hit me because I was looking down at my feet for signs of Hercules. That’s all.” She hugged her knees to her and shivered, hiding her cheek from view. “May I please go to bed?” She felt like a wet, boneless doll, slumped on Phryne’s side. She maneuvered Adeline to her pillow with a gentle nudge.

“Of course, Adeline. Lie down for a minute, and I will get you something to drink.” She had heard heavy footsteps that sounded like Mateo in the hall, and wanted to give the poor girl some privacy. Scarcely had she poured out a measure of raspberry vinegar from the carafe when Hazel, accompanied by a grave-faced Mateo, flung open the door. The man took up his post outside, clearly listening.

“I brought Adeline her book,” the younger girl said. “It was at the bottom of the stairs.” Her eyes darted to the room, but Adeline had closed herself in.

“Thank you, Hazel, she’s lying down,” Phryne said.

“What happened? Did the maid push her, or was she just clumsy because she was thinking about Latin tenses?”

Phryne beat down a wave of extreme irritation. “Neither, it seems. She said someone opened the door into the stairwell and it knocked her over. We shall all have to be very careful with those stairs.”

“Oh, only Adeline would be that silly,” she tossed off. “Anyway, we found Hercules. He was on the back patio; nobody saw him get out.” Her voice was level, but there was a curious gleam to Hazel’s eyes – triumph? That would bear thinking about. “Well, I have to go back down. Tell Adeline to come down and we’ll play draughts when she feels better!” She practically skipped out the door, but Mateo, before following her, gave a quick gesture to Phryne.

“Miss, Adeline has lied,” he said bluntly. “Those doors could not hit her. They open out, not into the stairwell. And I saw a lingering boy, maybe eighteen, slim, with dark hair. He used the back stairs and is fast as a burglar. I have heard her call him Paulos when she thinks we are not watching her on the patio. He is dangerous, I think. Be careful.” He gave Phryne a gunmetal stare for a moment longer, and strode off after Hazel.

Time for another telegram, Phryne thought as she returned to Adeline with the glass. And later, a recheck of the dossier, to see if Hazel Millerton had a sweetheart. Fortunately, the telephone was on the other side of the suite door, and she would not be overheard with both doors closed.

\---

Dot was finding detecting without Miss Fisher to be much tamer than previous experience would have led her to expect. Christine Camberwell had sat quietly on her lap for close to an hour, turning the pages in the vehicle identification book until spotting the car she said she and her friends had seen. “Yes, yes, this one,” she’d insisted. “It was blue and had wood bits on the wheels and a flyin’ bird on the front, and a buncha luggage on the back.” Dot had then had Christine take her to the corner near the docks where the car had appeared. It was a quiet street, far enough from the pier that the noise of arriving and departing ships was muffled by the surrounding buildings, close enough that the two hotels could hold passengers waiting for their ship to arrive. “It was right here,” the little girl pointed. “Alfred had a message on his collar. He’s our message runner when we need one, knows lots of tricks and stuff. He was runnin’ toward me, and the big car pulled up. I thought they were gonna run him over, but instead a big guy reached him in.”

“Did you recognize anyone in the car?” Dot was making notes in her book, feeling very professional. “Or do you remember what they might have looked like?”

“The big guy had a puckery face and a bumpy nose, like from pox, with a black-haired girl in plaits, and there was a short girl in the backseat, but I dinnit see much of her cause of her bein’ short. Just her hair was all piled up under a fancy green hat. I wonder if maybe they thot he was a stray?”

“How about the license?” Christine shook her head.

“I dunno my numbers too well. There was two fours that started it though.” Dot noted that down too.

“That’s good evidence, Christine. We have a blue Buick carrying luggage with a pair of 4s on the license, driven by a man with a scarred face and two younger girls as passengers.” The little girl practically beamed. “Now, I can’t promise that’s enough, but I will do everything I can to track down Alfred, alright? And if you remember or find anything, you can come to this address.” She gave her one of Miss Fisher’s cards, tapping the numbers carefully. “It’s the cream and red house on the Esplanade.”

“Thanks Mrs. Detective Collins! I’m gonna ask Sara and them all if they remember what day it was, 'zactly. We need our message dog back. We ain’t had him for near two months.” Christine raced off, leaving Dot suddenly frozen on the sidewalk. Detective Collins. The phrase rolled around in her mouth like a sip of European hot chocolate, warm and sweet down to her very center. It sounded almost as good as Mrs. Hugh Collins, she thought, a smile lighting her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jane is telling the concierge: "She's alright!"


	7. Roses and Jewelry

_Found likely rose STOP Thorns pricked King STOP Paulos Marinos on ship register STOP Searching for partner STOP PFisher_

Jack folded the telegram, relieved it had been less…inflammable… than the previous one from the irrepressible Lady Detective. He wouldn’t have to take notes on this one and then remove the original in order to preempt a decency statute scandal. He leaned back and surveyed the heaps of paper that had engulfed his desk in the hunt for sabotage suspects. “Collins!”

“Yes sir?”

“Does the last name Marinos ring any bells?”

“Not as such sir, why?”

“I’ve been going through the records of complaints against Grant’s business and his partner Green, trying to find the likeliest source for sabotage. And I thought I had come across that name, but now I can’t recall where.” They each took a stack of evidence folders, and silence reigned for close to twenty minutes.

“Sir, what about this?” Collins held out an autopsy report from a suspected gang murder case. “It’s not Marinos or a direct business connection, but it’s a body that’s been damaged the same way as that girl down in the morgue they pulled out of the bay.” Jack snatched the sheet and scanned it.

“Ears and hair removed, bleach stains around where they found the body, stabbed with a similarly-described knife.” He nodded. “Good catch Collins. And, it looks like there are more than a few Greeks in this gang, which could be a connection as well. Bring the car around and we’ll go down to the docks before they disperse for the evening.”

“Yes sir!” Collins sprang away.

 _Now we’re getting somewhere_ , Jack thought. A pang of longing slipped through him. _Thanks to Miss Fisher. Again._ He busied himself re-organizing the scattered files to be brought back down to records, when another name caught his eye. He had opened the file, laid it down, and forgotten to return to it, but it was an indecency complaint from a few months previous that had been dismissed. The name Green had been on the front, but it hadn’t been Louis Green, as he’d supposed. A Patrick Green had apprehended on questionable activity in the Botanical Gardens, along with a girl he had tried to claim was a relative. A dubious claim, given the questionable activity they'd been engaged in. An…Eileen Caron. Eileen Caron sounded familiar as well, so he flipped to the mugshot section. She was maybe twenty, a tall, pretty girl, with light hair that had been rather disarranged when the photo was taken. Maybe her name was in the list of extended family members for one of the traveling girls? But before he could pursue that train of thought, he heard the crunch of car wheels. He laid the folder down in the “Keep” pile, snatched up his hat, and pounded out the door to go interview some Greek gang members. With possibly, he thought, a stop at the telegraph office after.

\---

Phryne stayed with Adeline until she felt confident that the girl was not going to collapse once more into tears. Her fingers had been badly wrenched enough to need a splint on two, and the damage to her cheek was only covered by the liberal application of cold cream and powder. Phryne had anointed the girl’s bruises gently, avoiding the topic of Paulos for the moment. She might give him up soon, but not quite yet. After a few more tearful sniffles and a good long cold compress, Adeline had pronounced herself well enough to go down to the lounge. Phryne had escorted her down, ensconced her into a quiet corner with an admonishment not to read if her head began to hurt, and pulled Steven aside with a delicate pluck to the elbow. “Any word from the authorities?”

“Nothing yet,” he said, clasping her hand with his own. He was looking calmer today, but Adeline’s injury had disturbed him. “Did Adeline tell you what happened?”

“A little,” Phryne said, wanting to say more, but aware of just how close Lizzy was seated to them. “Her head was too rattled for her to make sense of it, but it sounded like she thought she was hit by the door.” She drew him a little further away toward the bookshelves, anticipating his next question.

“What do you think?” Phryne looked at her old friend’s husband for a long moment, her skepticism writ large on her face. He nodded, and his next question was in French. “Our rose?” She chanced a glance around the room, saw Mateo watching keenly, and simpered through her speech.

“I’m afraid she’s heartbroken. I would bet money she’s refused him something, and he retaliated.” She wondered suddenly at Mateo’s expression, if he perhaps knew more French than he let on. “I can only hope they would rather catch him than punish her or your wife.”

“And what about my business? Do you think he is bound with whoever is seducing and stealing my heart's lifeblood?” She shook her head and laughed lightly, stroking his lapel as if he had paid her the most flirtatious of compliments.

“My dear Steven! I’ve only been here two days. You’ll need to give me a little more time than that to work miracles.” He patted her hand, a muscle under his eye twitching frantically despite his staid body language.

“Forgive me, my dear. I’m anxious. Too many unknowns.” They drifted cautiously back toward the girls, whose attention had been drawn by a gruff Kostas entering the room.

“I have been informed,” he began stiltedly, but was interrupted by Hazel leaping up.

“May we go into town today at last? Is that it?” The man stuttered, and Phryne thought she saw the same swallow of irritation that had been afflicting her every time the girl spoke.

He began again. “I have been informed that you are to be allowed…” This time it was Louisa who interrupted.

“Oh Hercules, you naughty thing!” She leapt up with her book torn, and the dog dropped to the floor with a yip, page in his mouth. Jane, startled, dragged her feet away from the dog as he bolted between her legs, and four velvety black paws made haste for the door of the lounge. Kostas gave another irritated shudder, scooped the dog up one-handed, and practically threw him into Hazel’s arms, where he struggled and barked until Lizzy retrieved him and placed him on Desdemona’s lap. He turned around three times like a little black cat before settling once again with his head under her hand. Louisa glowered “One of you two need to learn to control your dog.”

“As I was to be saying,” Kostas all but snarled, “you are to be allowed to leave the hotel today. This is as long as you are kept with Mateo or myself. I would suggest you stay close, or the privilege may be taken away.” Message delivered, he stalked back to the doorway, where he could watch the comings and goings of the guests leaving their luncheon in the dining room.

Five eager faces turned to Mr. Grant and Miss Fisher as one. Under the force of such magnified supplication, Steven collapsed like wet bread. “Very well girls. Everyone upstairs, change into walking clothing, and we will see what we can see today.”

“Can we go see the Acropolis?” Lizzy asked. She was stuffing her pockets with her things, having forgotten a handbag entirely. “I want to take a picture there like Isadora Duncan did.”

“I’m afraid that might be outside your constitution for today,” Phryne said, “at least with those shoes on.” She gestured at the girl’s grey pumps, which were high enough that Lizzy wobbled slightly on her pins when she wasn’t paying attention. “Oh, these aren’t really mine,” she said, unblushing. “I borrowed them, but I can run up and change. I want to sightsee!” Before Phryne could reply, she had leapt up to follow Mateo as he moved toward the elevator with the others. Kostas lingered a moment longer, then strode away to the other end of the room to demand a drink from a passing waiter.

 _Curious_ , thought Phryne, relieved to be alone. The shoes were, on passing inspection, the same ones that the mystery girl had been wearing when she dropped the medallion into the shrubbery. But Lizzy had no reason to lie about borrowing the shoes for the morning, and if she were an impostor, there would be no reason to get rid of something with her own initial on it. Perhaps the shoes belonged to one of her suite-mates. The detective arranged herself in her chair, and took a sip of sherry.

Louisa was another point of curiosity, with the strange note in her wastepaper basket. Phryne unfolded it, and smoothed it flat. It was, as she had seen on initial glance, a series of decimal numbers, arranged in neat columns. Prices, sales points, or dates perhaps? It could signal the work of the saboteur of Green & Grant Shipping. But Louisa hardly had motivation to undermine her father’s business. On the other hand, Kitty was missing jewelry, and it could be a list of valuations or even pawn ticket numbers. Perhaps Louisa or one of the other girls needed money? Well, there was an easy enough way to check that.

Three hours later, a gaggle of sunburnt and footsore young ladies accompanied by four chaperones were returned to the Hotel Artemisia, laden down with shopping bags. A third soldier had stayed to keep eyes on Adeline, so Kostas and Mateo kept eyes on Phryne and Steven as they herded the girls up and down lines of stalls in between the more historical sites of the area. Jane, under strict instructions from Miss Fisher to purchase herself a fine bracelet or necklace, had helpfully dragged the group from jeweler to jeweler, without regard to the prices, high or low. The scenes had been instructive, but unfortunately not conclusive.

Louisa had sniffed at the vendors with their silver and tin bangles laid out on rugs, but had laid out considerably more than was necessary to obtain a finely-worked pendant with lemon-colored crystals from a jeweler with a full shop, noting down the cost, location and date in her travel journal with a sentimental smile. She had then offered the back of her neck to Steven so he could fasten it, but was stymied by Miss Fisher’s quicker hand. Lizzy and Hazel had quarreled yet again, this time over a cunning brooch of tricolored metals, designed as a bouquet of flowers, with chips of mica in the centers. Lizzy was willing to pay the premium rather than barter, so she won out, leaving Hazel in high dudgeon for nearly an hour, and Lizzy puffing her chest out in victory. In retaliation, Hazel had bought the next bracelet that Lizzy admired at a heavily argued-down price while Lizzy looked on in a poverty-stricken pique. Desdemona had purchased no jewelry whatsoever, but was persuaded by a fanciful linen-bound notebook printed with leaping gazelles and a thumb-sized vase in black and orange, before lagging behind and begging for a rest on a convenient bench. Jane, bartering well with Greek that was slowly becoming conversational, had become the proud owner of a long double-length of silver chain necklace with tiny pieces of inlay that would coordinate with better than half her wardrobe. “But Miss Fisher, what do you want me to do with it?” she whispered as they tumbled back into the hotel.

“Go up and change for dinner, and put on your red frock,” Phryne replied. “But don’t wear the necklace. Ask if anyone has some red or black ribbon you can borrow. Say the latch has broken and put it away somewhere safe. I recommend either in a shoe under the lining, or the binding of a fattish book.”

“I’ve plenty of those,” Jane said with a smile. “And I think I know what you’re planning. You want to see if someone will have the ribbon that matches what was caught in the charm, or if she tries to take the necklace, since it’s broken. Do you think that will help?”

“Maybe not while we’re at dinner,” Phryne nodded, “but it may make something happen soon.”

\---

Dot was exhausted, and beginning to think she wasn’t cut out for the detecting business after all. She had made her way back toward Miss Fisher’s house expecting to help Mr. Butler with dinner, but had been inundated instead with urchins. Four of them, including Christine, had descended on her as she had gotten out of the trolley, all clamoring to talk to Mrs. Detective Collins, and all extremely interested in participating in her investigation. She had taken three new witness statements about the dog’s disappearance, with help. Mostly, that help had consisted of children leaning over her shoulder and exclaiming things like, “But you spelled Alfred’s name all wrong!” It's 'posta be L-F-R-A-T!" and “maybe if you find this dog, you can find Big Gigi next since she ran off too,” and “do you have a gun? Cambie said you had a gun. You can shoot that toff what stole him if you have a gun.” Then, the heel of her shoe had given out half a block from the house, and she’d hopped home, avoiding puddles, not entirely successfully, from a brief rain shower. Dot wasn’t sure she felt up to hunting down so much as a missing earring at this point in the day.

Now, as she was limping through the front door, the phone was ringing. “Hello?”

“Oh Dottie, I’m sorry,” Hugh’s voice came through the line. “I’m going to be a little late tonight.”

“Did something happen?” She heard her voice catch, but just a mite.

“Nothing really,” her husband insisted. “We went down to the docks and one of the wharfies decided to take a swing at the Inspector for asking questions. He was too soaked to connect, so we’re bringing him in for drunk and disorderly. The Inspector has a message to send off, but as soon as we’re done here at the telegraph office, though, I’ll come right home.”

“Don’t worry Hugh,” Dot replied, relieved. “Mr. Butler and I will keep dinner warm for you. I had a long day myself, so we haven’t gotten everything finished quite yet anyway. This will be just perfect timing.” They hung up after a few more sentences which went, thankfully, unheard by the exchange operator. Dot was enjoying being married quite a bit. And she resolved, as she cored and stuffed mushrooms for dinner while Mr. B checked on the roast, to go over her notes just one more time, and see about tracking down that car. Then, she would send a night letter to Miss Fisher and give her an outline. It wouldn’t hurt to get a true professional opinion on the whole thing, even if she did want to solve this case herself.


	8. Finding Trouble

Unfortunately for Miss Fisher, her dangled bait had not hooked so much as a minnow at dinner. Jane had gotten a promise of ribbon from Desdemona, but it was a fat hair ribbon that didn’t match in the slightest, and none of the other girls were forthcoming with other options. Louisa had occupied Steven’s time almost completely, showing him her pendant from every angle, and Adeline and Hazel had quarreled, this time over Hercules running off with Adeline’s scarf and returning without it. When they were at last taken off to bed, Phryne felt sure she would be relieved at the quiet of her rooms. Instead though, deprived of company, itching for action, and missing her Melbourne family with a longing that felt like thirst, she found herself haunting the corridor by the telegraph office. She had had a few lines from Mac, nothing more, and was considering sending back something absurdly sentimental along the wires when she heard the double footsteps of one of the girls and an accompanying Mateo. She slipped around the corner and concealed herself in the shadows, listening closely.

“I won’t be but a moment, I promise,” came Lizzy’s voice. “I only want to send my uncle a note. Look, I wrote it out this time.” The rustle of paper from her pocket, then an annoyed sigh from her escort.

“You should have called down,” came Mateo’s response. “They lock up the desk at night, but I can still take messages down for you. Don’t you remember this?”

A short catch of breath. “Well, I… I didn’t want to disturb the others. Everyone had such a long day, and it was lovely to go out, but they were all rather cross with each other.”

“I will take you back upstairs, or to the front desk, and you can leave your message with Miss Rigsa,” said the long-suffering Mateo. But before Lizzy could respond, there was a noise like an explosion from behind the door leading to the front of the hotel. Phryne burst around the corner just as Mateo whirled away.

“What was it Mateo?”

“I don’t know! I will go to see, you take her back to the room,” he commanded as he sprinted through the doors. But Lizzy had already bolted away in terror, taking the opposite direction of the corridor and the telegraph office, toward the doors that lead to the patio.

“Lizzy! Lizzy, wait!” Whatever – or whoever – the noise had been, Lizzy was terrified. She hurtled through the solid doors with a slam, and as Phryne reached them, she could hear the screech of metal. The door refused to budge more than a few inches when she heaved on it. Through the side windows, she could see a metal patio bench wedged against the doorway, and the pale figure of Lizzy tearing off around the corner of the building. “Lizzy!” Miss Fisher could make no headway against the jammed door, so she turned and sprinted back down the hallway, nearly colliding with Mateo.

“It’s all right, it’s all right Miss,” he said breathlessly. “Some troublemaker set off firecrackers at the gate and it broke a window. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not all right,” Phryne nearly shouted. “Lizzy has gone tearing off into the city in fright, and jammed the door behind her.” The man’s face grew grave.

“If it was that boy, she is in danger.” Without another word, he turned on his heel and they ran together through the hotel. Somehow, both of them had drawn their guns without the other noticing. Guests were poking their heads out to see what the confusion was, and somewhere, a dog was howling wildly, but neither Phryne nor the soldier spared a step. At the lobby, they encountered Kostas, who was red-faced and blustering. Kostas looked askance at her pistol, but Mateo gave him a quelling glance. A few sharp words in Greek were exchanged, and the taller man was suddenly racing toward the stairs and climbing them two at a time.

“What happened,” Phryne gasped, “why isn’t he with everyone?”

“He said there was an electrical short or some sort of small fire in the room – nothing more than a cigarette in a waste can, but it has made chaos. There was smoke, and the girls are all being moved while the room is made safe.” Phryne felt her stomach sink.

They searched the grounds for nearly an hour, joined by the concierge and Steven and a few other of the male guests they knocked up from the hotel. But neither Paulos nor Lizzy was anywhere outside. It was Desdemona who found her when they returned to their rooms. She was curled up in the bathtub under her own robe, stabbed to death, covered in peroxide bleach.

\---

_Galloway killed stabbed bleached STOP Paulos their suspect STOP One of party mine STOP Wishing for conference with you_

_Will notify family from here STOP Please keep out of police business STOP If cannot then keep out of jail STOP Saving you some whiskey_

\---

The authorities, Phryne was relieved to find, were fast, if not terrifically pleased by her presence. Kitty’s release was expedited by the admittedly questionable assertion that if the chaperones had been present, Lizzy would have been protected from the roving assailant that had been haunting the group for the past few weeks. Mateo vouched for Mr. Grant’s upright behavior during the whole of the arrest (rather charitably, all things considered), and Phryne, by sheer force of personality alone, was allowed to remove Jane and her effects in with her, with the added bonus of being able to use the time to examine the crime scene more thoroughly than truly legally allowed. It was not a pretty sight. The killer had used Lizzy’s own bathrobe as a shield against gore, then tossed it over the poor girl’s body, doused the whole thing liberally in peroxide from a bottle hidden in the bathroom cupboard, and washed up in the sink. A pair of curlers against the woodwork of the cabinetry and a match placed to the wallpaper in the corridor had provided the smoke that had driven everyone from the room and the hallway, but the knife used to kill her was neither turned up in the police search of the party, nor hidden in the room when Phryne looked through it the next morning while retrieving Jane's things.

“It does suggest, I’m afraid,” Phryne said to Jane as they folded clothes, “that could have one of your traveling companions who did this, rather than Paulos.” Jane suppressed a shudder. How Miss Fisher could say that without turning a hair! But she had been in wartime, so maybe it was just something you got used to. Jane hoped dead bodies was not something she would have to get used to any time soon. “Don’t worry dear, there’s nothing else in the bathroom of yours.”

“Lizzy didn’t borrow anything much of mine anyway,” Jane said. “My clothes didn’t fit her.” She pushed the last pair of shoes into her case and sat on it to squash it shut. “I know what you’re going to ask next, and I’ve been racking my brain,” she added. “The only people I know stayed in the hall in all that smoke was Mr. Grant, because Kostas was yelling at him, and Adeline, because she was holding onto my hand like…” She caught her breath. She didn’t want to say “like death,” though that’s what she’d been thinking.

“Oh Jane,” Phryne said suddenly. She floated down onto the bed next to Jane and enveloped her in a blue-silk-patterned hug that smelt strongly of spice and citrus perfume with a tang of gasoline. “I’m so sorry Jane. I should have kept you in Melbourne.”

“Miss, you aren’t at home,” Jane protested, even as she felt tears heat her eyelids. “Why on earth should you keep me there?” She bumped her head into Miss Fisher’s shoulder for a long moment.

“Well,” Phryne huffed. “From now on, you are staying in my rooms, and there is going to be tighter supervision while we try to figure out why Lizzy should be killed, and who did it.” As they tripped down to the elevator with the luggage, Phryne pressed the question. “So, you lost track of all the rest – Hazel, Louisa and Desdemona – in the haze?”

“At different points,” Jane admitted. “Louisa was first out the door when the smoke started inside, and I saw her when Kostas pushed her into the door down at the other end.” She paused as they boarded the elevator and the operator moved to the side for them. “At first, the corridor was clear, but then more smoke came, and Kostas made us all move to out of the way when everyone else came out of their rooms to see what was going on. I do remember that Hercules stopped barking at one point, but I thought it was because Desdemona had picked him up. But I didn’t see Hazel or Desdemona carrying him when we got into the new room and I didn’t have any sort of clock to be able to tell how long we were separated.” They exited at the next floor, and Phryne tapped her fingers meditatively as the elevator doors closed.

“It was a risky plan, if it was a plan at all. Especially since Lizzy was downstairs. She would have run out the door, jammed it, run around to the other side of the patio, up the stairs or else gotten on the elevator, come back in the room and been met by the killer. Since the elevator operator didn’t mention seeing her, she definitely took the stairs. And it does beg the question of where the knife would be. It certainly wasn’t in the room or on any of the girls.” Phryne nodded decisively. “The hotel still thinks it’s Paulos that’s done this, with a knife of his own. Perhaps another chat with Adeline would be instructive.”

But either Adeline’s nerve had deserted her, or had come back in entirely the wrong way. She flatly refused to speak with Miss Fisher or Jane, claiming a headache in a weepy voice through the door of her room. “I’m sorry Jane, tell Miss Fisher she’s very kind, but I’ve talked with the police so much today, and I just want to read some Herodotus and take a nap.”

Instead, Phryne decided to interview her newly-released friend. Washed, curled, dressed in new clothes, and wearing her favorite set of pearls, Katherine Grant looked a different person entirely from the woman Jane had seen thirty-six hours previously. But as she sank onto a chair in Phryne’s room with a stiff drink in her hand, Collingwood grit was still quite evident.

“Jane,” she said politely, “could you cover your ears for a moment?” Jane obliged, dragging a cushion over her head. After a few minutes’ worth of horrified, furious invective had been vented, Miss Fisher tapped her shoulder, and Jane sat back up, looking ruffled, but not terrifically scandalized. Perhaps she’d heard some of it before.

“Feel better, Kit?”

“Much better, Fish.”

“Now, let’s get down to business. Would any of the girls would want to hurt Lizzy?” Kitty shook her head.

“I can’t believe any of them would do something so awful on purpose. They’re fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old girls. Passions run high, but then get forgotten. And with Theresé leaving, we lost a mediator. Some days they will be tenderest of friends, and other days, quarrels will erupt over what seems like nothing.” Jane nodded.

“I got hideously cross with Lizzy one day when she borrowed my parasol and tore a gap right through it on a nail. But then she was all tearful and sorry, and bought me a pile of sweets to make up when we were out in the city.”

“Well, we know she quarreled with Hazel on the regular,” Phryne observed, putting a comforting hand around Jane’s shoulders.

“Desdemona hates her right now,” said Jane, to surprise of both adults. “I guess Lizzy broke something of hers too. I heard her asking for patience with difficult and careless people while she was praying on Sunday, and she was looking daggers...” Jane broke off. Oh, it was too horrible. Miss Fisher gave her a tight squeeze, and a meaningful look toward the door. Jane shook her head resolutely, despite the shaking in her stomach. Lizzy was – had been – her friend. She was going to help Miss Fisher find her killer.

“Do you suppose a girl who had already killed and mutilated one person would pray for forbearance with another though?”

“Fish, what a terrible thought.” Mrs. Grant shook her head. “Are you positive this isn’t a mysterious stranger, maybe one who followed Lizzy inside and wanted to, I don’t know, rob her or something? Or what about one of the staff?”

“It’s a possibility, though a slim one. But I don’t think a complete stranger is likely. And the staff are all accounted for – the ones who weren’t signed out for the day were accounted for by the military men. The fact is, there are too many things converging on this trip to suggest several random crimes. And there’s a very similar corpse in the City South Morgue that shows this person has connections there. Supposing money is a feature though, let’s examine the facts. What jewelry are you missing?” Kitty pulled out the inventory, and ran her finger through it.

“I missed a silver locket and chain, right after we landed in Thessaloniki. Not valuable, and I thought it had gotten lost in the confusion with the rooms. Later on, a pair of rose-gold earrings with drop stone quartz crystals, and a hatpin with a gold-plated bead. Again, not worth a lot, but still nowhere to be found.” Another page. “Then here, the day after we landed in Athens, my onyx and pink rose quartz pendant went missing, along with a matching string of beads.”

“So, it was nothing expensive? Nothing Theresé would take if she were say, trying to leave and make her own way?”

“No,” she said. “We paid Theresé well enough she wouldn’t need it, and they were small, flashy pieces, not fine jewelry. I keep too close an eye on things like these with stones,” she added, gesturing to the pearls, which were interspersed with glittering onyx beads. “Although it’s strange that nothing valuable went walkabout while I was locked up. I was half expecting to come back to an empty box.”

“So, which of the girls is likely to need a little extra money?”

“Hard to say,” she replied. “Desdemona maybe. She likes pretty things. Adeline is scrupulous, but if she’s taken with a brute of a boy, who knows. Hazel has the least pocket-money, but she haggles like a native and guards it with her life.”

“Don’t forget, Mrs. Grant, Louisa was the one admiring your earrings so much,” Jane added, glad to have some experience in this realm of crime that might be useful.

“Louisa was flattering me because Mr. Grant was in earshot,” Kitty replied with a tight half-smile. “She’s charming, but not in the least subtle. Thankfully, my husband is utterly block-headed when it comes to that sort of thing, bless the man.”

“So,” Phryne said. “We have a non-opportunistic petty thief who is also a corporate saboteur, who has some connection to two different murders. One, an unknown girl, to join your trip under false pretenses, possibly to gain access to Mr. Grant’s business dealings, and two, Lizzy, for reasons equally unknown.”

“And don’t forget Adeline – getting nearly pushed down the stairs. Although that might have been the boy, not the impostor.”

“I have a police inspector friend,” Phryne said to Kitty. “He's looking into this Paulos boy, to see if he can find any reason that he would follow you around the country, or if there’s any connection to any business rivals of yours. I told the police he was investigating a similar body, but they waved me away with the point of a pistol. Clearly, I’m going to need to work a little harder. Or else find Theresé for them. And I want a look at that telegram Lizzy was going to send to her father as well.”

“Well, I hope he finds something soon.” Kitty refilled her glass and took another drink. “I’m going to be locking the girls into their rooms tonight. We’ve got messages out to the whole city, and nobody has found Theresé. And we’ll be sailing them home just as soon as we can. Louisa’s father will be here within three days. That doesn’t give you much time, Fish.”

“No,” Phryne said with a frown, “not much time at all.”


	9. First Interview

Phryne, accompanied by Jane, was in the telegraph office yet again that evening, having collected a fascinating missive from Dot outlining her own forays into the detecting arena, and was trying to work out a way to send Jack a surprise and arguing with the clerk about it. “Look, you’ve heard of sending flowers, haven’t you? Well, this is just the same.” Some more forceful language produced an assent at last, and the impossible man transmitted her request along with a bill to be sent to Wardlow. Jane gave her an admiring look as she swirled out the door in a huff.

“Miss,” she said, “will you teach me to do that?”

“Do what?”

“Persuading people – talking them into things. You do it all the time, and I want to learn how.” They trailed to the lounge, Phryne with a pensive finger on her lips. Jane persisted. “You do all these things that Aunt P says aren’t ladylike, but you’re still a lady. You do all these things that Detective Robinson doesn’t approve of, but he still approves of you.” She folded her hands and fixed her adopted mother with a determined stare. “I want to know how.”

“How,” Phryne repeated thoughtfully. “I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about the how of it all. I suppose it’s a matter of internal conviction.”

“Like how?”

“Well, who do you feel certain didn’t kill Lizzy?”

“Desdemona,” Jane replied instantly.

“And why do you think so?” She straightened in her chair as Miss Fisher handed her a lemonade. “Marshall your thoughts – you don’t have to answer instantly.”

“She’s kind. She loves animals. She loves books.” Phryne shook her head.

“Those things don’t preclude someone from killing if they are in danger or threatened.”

“But Lizzy wasn’t a blackmailer or a heavy or anything like that.” Jane said slowly. “She was clumsy and thoughtless, and couldn’t keep her feelings secret in the slightest.” Seeing Miss Fisher unconvinced, she continued. “Desdemona and I have been friends almost since we boarded the boat, since the other girls were there before us and had already gotten to know each other and Theresé. We talked about books and art, and all that Lizzy wanted to talk about was boys. And Mrs. Grant is right, there’s no way Desdemona would pray for patience over a broken figurine and then hurt her like that. It doesn’t match up.”

“Desdemona is coming in now,” Miss Fisher interjected. “We could ask her directly. Boldness might shake something out of her.”

“Miss Phryne,” Jane exclaimed in reproach, “she’s my friend. If you want to interview her, that’s fine. But don’t accuse her with no evidence. You’ll just make her miserable, and we’re all miserable enough.”

“Very well, Jane,” she said with a fond look. “I’ll ask her a few questions, but you can stop me if you feel I’m being unfair.”

As Desdemona sat down, she gave a shaky smile to the pair. “I hope you don’t mind if I join you,” she said quietly. “Mr. Grant is doing business in the new room, and I couldn’t bear another minute in there with Louisa and Hazel. Hercules almost got out again, little monster. Hazel should really train him better.” She smoothed her long purple skirt down over her legs, reminding Miss Fisher of the dog attack scars that she was supposed to have.

“Have you ever had a dog before, Desdemona?” Miss Fisher glanced at Jane, who nodded her approval at the gentle question.

“I love dogs,” the girl proclaimed. “They’re so intelligent and sweet.”

“Really, I feel more kinship with cats,” said Miss Fisher. “I’ve been wary of dogs since a mongrel nearly took my finger off as a child.”

“Yes,” Desdemona paused, shuffling her feet slightly. “I’ve been bitten myself, but just because one dog is angry doesn’t mean they all are. Usually it’s the owner, or lack of one.”

“I suppose,” Phryne replied. It was an unusual line to take, but not completely unreasonable. “I’m surprised he didn’t bark when the smoke started. It seems like it would have alerted everyone earlier.”

“Oh, he got out again,” Desdemona said with a dismissive wave. “When Lizzy left after her,” she paused fractionally. “Her argument.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize she had been arguing? With whom?” Desdemona shook her head.

“I don’t want to lag.” She looked at Jane sidelong. “You understand, I don’t want the Grants in strife because of us,” she said quietly. Jane gave her friend an encouraging smile.

“She won’t breathe a word, I promise, whatever it is.” She nodded at Miss Fisher. “She’s a brick.”

Desdemona looked dubious. Phryne dragged her chair forward, screening Desdemona from the view of Kostas. “Mrs. Grant is my friend too. I want to help her, and I want to understand what happened to Lizzy.” Desdemona’s face grew grave, but she seemed to have resolved something within herself.

“It started as a fight with Adeline,” she explained. “Something about a boy – I didn’t hear it. Lizzy was teasing her, wearing something of Hazel’s. Hazel started shouting, and then Louisa tried to break it up. Louisa walked out to calm down, but Hazel just kept whispering nasty things about how Lizzy was a thief and Adeline was a tart.” Her voice was almost inaudible. “Lizzy left with Mateo just before Louisa came back in. But I think Louisa was the one who started the wallpaper on fire outside the room.”

“Did you see her do it?”

“No,” Desdemona looked into the distance, remembering. “But she was shaking her fingers when she came back in, like she had burnt them, and she went right to the washroom, and then I heard running water.” She looked up with a start at the sound of the other girls approaching. “Please, don’t say anything. If… if it was Louisa that set that fire, then they might blame her for Lizzy. And they won’t listen, like how they wouldn’t listen about Mrs. Grant. Please?”

“Don’t worry, Desdemona,” Jane said, patting her hand as Hazel barreled into the room and made straight for them to tell them it was dinnertime. “Mrs. Grant won’t be going back to the jail. Miss Fisher will make sure of it.”

\---

The next morning, based on her conversation with Desdemona, Jane demanded that she be the one to talk to Louisa, not Miss Fisher. “Louisa only really likes Mr. Grant anyway,” she observed. “She puts on all of her formal manners when Mrs. Grant or Theresé is around. I think she might be shy.”

“Not shy, Jane dear, jealous. But I agree that you should chat with her discreetly. Try when we are all at the Olympic Stadium. There will be plenty of chances for you to break away from the group while still staying within view of your guards.” Jane had taken to her task with gusto. The sun was glistening on the shining marble, and bands of orange sunset brightening to golden morning promised a beautiful, but blisteringly hot, day. They had barely made their way into the ruins when Jane waved Louisa over. Phryne lingered discreetly behind, her Vest Pocket camera out to take pictures. Jane began her interrogation with a subtlety that spoke of careful consideration.

“Louisa, I have a question. It's... a little complicated?” She put on her best naïve face.

“Of course, Jane, whatever is it?” The condescending benevolence rolled out at once. Jane felt a surge of satisfaction.

“Well, it’s awkward, but, do you think…” she paused, trying to phrase the question just so. “Do you think there’s a way to get Kostas to notice me?” She was rewarded with a bark of laughter from the older girl.

“Oh, you goose!” she smiled. “What makes you think I’d be any good at that?”

“Well, Mr. Grant likes you so much, and so do Mateo and Kostas, and I just don’t know how to talk to men. Boys are just boys, but Kostas is different.” Jane was enjoying this role. She twirled her hair and added a little uncertain swish of her skirt for good measure.

“Oh, Mr. Grant,” Louisa tutted. “As for Kostas, you just have to be nice to him.”

“But I am nice! I’m very polite, but he still won’t let me so much as peek out the door once we’re in for the night, and the other night, he let you go out and smoke.”

“I don’t smoke, Jane,” Louisa replied. Her tone had grown a shade more serious but Jane decided to push further.

“But you had Mr. Grant’s lighter when you went out,” she said. “I guess I thought maybe the cigarettes helped you talk to him? Like you had a chat, and he understood you a little better, and that’s why he gives you a little freedom.” She gave a dramatic sigh. “I just want him to like me. Just a little.” Louisa was still dubious, glancing around, but the only adult within earshot was Miss Fisher in her glorious linen whitework coat, who seemed to be fully absorbed in framing up a picture of the Stadium.

“Fine, yes, it was Mr. Grant’s lighter, but I didn’t go out to smoke. I wanted a breath away from Hazel and I had a note that I didn’t want her to read, so I took it out there to burn it. Kostas was down the way checking the elevator. I wasn’t chatting with him, don’t spread that around.” Her voice was growing faster as she spoke.

“What were you burning?” Seeing Louisa’s face, Jane amended quickly, trying to force her expression from sharp curiosity to romantic notions. “I won’t tell if it was a note from someone. I’ve never gotten a love note before – was it from Kostas?”

“It wasn’t a love note, no.” Louisa was truly angry now. “And you shouldn’t be making eyes at Kostas. He’s married, and he’s much too old for you anyway. The way you could think about such a thing when Lizzy died, ugh, how callous young girls can be!” She stalked off to look at a statue, leaving Jane to be collected by Miss Fisher, who gave her a proud squeeze of the shoulder.

“Excellent work Jane, I heard everything.” She held up the camera. “Shall I take a picture to commemorate your first interrogation? A little to the right and we can get the mountain in the background.”

“Yes please!” Jane’s smile was beaming. She was starting to get the hang of this.


	10. Spaghettigram

Lunchtime for Detective Robinson brought a surprise. Without understanding how it had been managed, he was surveying a steaming plateful of spaghetti and acountrements that had appeared on his desk delivered by courier, courtesy of Phryne Fisher. The note attached read: “I felt certain you wouldn’t want escargot, so I improvised. They refused to transmit an order for wine.” How on earth was the woman so good at making him smile from another continent? He took a forkful and practically sighed with delight. Suddenly, reviewing case files for leads seemed like a positively enjoyable activity. Talking of which, he never had followed up with that Eileen Caron name.

A few minutes of searching supplied him with reading material to enjoy with his spaghetti, and, glory above, garlic bread hot enough that he wondered if someone had concealed a bread oven in the cell next to the Greek. Eileen Caron was the daughter of one Andrea Caron. And, interestingly, Andrea Caron and her notorious sister Jeanne were co-owners of a French shipping firm. Well, shipping could be a connection. And the Caron sisters were known to be frighteningly ruthless. Andrea’s husband had perished mysteriously, and Jeanne was known to frequent the toughest of establishments in search of companionship. But where had he heard that name linked with Grant & Green? He took another few meditative bites; it was impossible to eat food this delicious absently. He could eat a barrelful of it, but it would be a morsel at a time.

 _Wait._ “Barrel Mike!”

“Sir?” The constable on duty, Wilkins, peeked his head around the corner.

“Constable, do you know the whereabouts of Barrel Mike, the wharfie heavy?”

“He was doing a stretch, but he got out last June. Do you want me to bring him in?”

“No Constable, but I might go out and have a word with him today.” Barrel Mike, so-called due to both his physique and the amount of grog he could hold, had been involved in several dockside actions that Jack could recall. And his name had most definitely been linked with the Caron sisters, as well as a fair amount of missing inventory from Grant & Green. So, there was a connection. But how did he link with the younger Caron? Another bite of spaghetti, being cautious of his clothing. That was unclear. But there had been low-level sabotage; the Caron sisters might be making a more pointed effort these days.

The man they’d dragged in yesterday night and clapped in the cells was babbling dubiously and singing what sounded like a Greek-accented version of ‘Bully in the Alley’ at top volume. _Where did he get more alcohol anyway?_ “Wilkins, they are supposed to be drying out back there.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, abashed. “One of the diggers from earlier must have had a flask on him. I’ll be more thorough in the future.” Wilkins sheepishly made his way back to the cells to confiscate the grog and Jack was suddenly glad for Collins. The man’s promotion had been well-deserved.

\---

As the next day dawned, Miss Fisher was still regretting her complete lack of wardrobe, but she had a growing dilemma on her hands. On one hand, she needed clothing. On the other, everything she bought was going to have to be shipped somewhere, she didn’t know quite where that was going to be, and Rigel was not a cargo plane to be loaded down with every bauble, book, and bangle that caught her eye. She tossed a linen skirt over the arm of a chair with a huff. “Everything stinks like fuel,” she growled to nobody in particular. “And nothing matches.” She added a dab of perfume on her jaw to cover the scent, dragging on a green patterned blouse and a pair of cream trousers, ready to make a stormy (and late) entrance on the breakfast table. But, the outfit still needed a finishing touch. Hanging on the coat hook by the door was her scarf, enameled bird pinned on carefully and secured with a double stitch courtesy of Dot. The homely little bird glinted blue-green in the sunlight, and she felt a surge of gladness she couldn’t quite place. She wrapped the scarf dashingly around her neck and decided to hold off on a visit to a tailor. With the right accessories and a few judicious adjustments of neckline, she could dress the way she preferred without overstuffing her suitcases. It was a challenge, and she hadn’t balked at one of those in a long time. Nevertheless, she found herself taking the long way around to the dining room, by way of the stairs, and past the reception desk. Miss Rigas was there on duty, twirling one finger idly in her sandy hair.

“Miss Fisher,” she said, springing to attention. “Anything I can help you with?”

“I was wondering if you could give me the name of a milliner?” She gestured to her hairband ruefully. “Flying in has deprived me of most things that would suit for the sunshine here.”

“There are a number of custom shops on…” the receptionist trailed off as Phryne waved her hand.

“Oh no, nothing custom. Ready-to-wear is fine. Whatever suits the locals will suit me as well,” she said genially. Miss Rigas seemed to warm at that.

“Well, if you don’t mind shopping in the same locales as I do, there’s a lovely little place a block from the stadium where they have some fine millinery. They pay fair wages as well.”

“The wage parity clinches it,” Phryne smiled. “If you could note that address down for me, I’ll make it my morning’s adventure.” In fact, she resolved to herself, it might even be better to simply buy herself a quick bite outside, rather than navigate the perilous waters of breakfast with the girls and Kitty as she re-established herself as the Woman in Charge over Louisa once more. She could return for lunch.

That settled, she had Miss Rigas call her a cab. The shop, when she found it, was not quite what she had been expecting. It was a milliner's it was true, but the wizened woman behind the counter was much less interested in selling her a straw hat than she was shouting in Greek at the flurry of young men who were in and out of the back of the shop. Some carried bolts of fabric or rolls of ribbon that could have ostensibly been hatmaking supplies, but many more seemed burdened with pamphlets or crates with mysterious contents. Phryne, having finally possessed herself of a close-fitting straw cloche trimmed with glinting glass beads and a turquoise band, left with puzzlement as the uppermost feeling in her brain. She had carefully avoided any of the subtly-suggested red ribbons and pins that might be signals of a kind she did not wish to send, but she wondered as she came up the drive, whether Miss Rigas had intended the Communist gathering place as an invitation or a warning. She was hoping lunch would allow her to settle the question.

Lunch, however, was to cause something of an upheaval in its own right. Louisa, devoid of her usual companion of Steven, latched onto her as soon as she had stepped over the threshold into the sunlit dining area, begging for an account of the flight over India. Phryne, desperate for a chance to sit down, fended her off with a promise of the full narrative once she had filled her plate. But she had barely ingested three bites of kedgeree when Steven came racing to the table in a complete state of panic. “Phryne, please, can you come to the desk? They’ve – they’ve found Theresé.” A murmur of interest ran through the girls as Phryne stood. Kostas gave a gesture, stopping Jane from leaping to follow.

“Sorry ladies, story time will have to wait for later,” she said, striding away. Steven’s face boded ill, and when she arrived, she saw a tearful Kitty being awkwardly comforted by Miss Rigas as two uniformed officers looked on. “What happened?”

“They found her in the harbor,” he said, his voice trembling. “She’s been dead for ages. Probably since the day after she disappeared.” His hands were trembling as he pushed away a face-down photograph. Phryne slipped it away from him and flipped it over. The woman was barely recognizable, head damaged by what was likely a boat propeller, but there were cuts on her hands and patchy stains, as if she’d been splashed with bleach.

“It rules her out as a suspect of both propaganda distribution and Lizzy’s murder,” Kitty spat. “At long last.” Phryne resisted the urge to snarl herself, but only barely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bully in the Alley is an actual sea shanty, and one of the ones in my writing playlist. Check it out on Youtube if you're curious (The Kimber's Men version is my favorite)


	11. Clue Potluck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: discussion of abusive relationship

Four days had gone by since Lizzy’s murder, two since the discovery of Theresé’s body. Phryne supervised the girls whenever she could. All five were on edge, and it took the concerted effort of the Grants, Miss Fisher, and two members of the Greek military to keep them from savaging each other at times. Louisa’s father had been delayed by weather, and Louisa grew more aloof, attaching herself like a limpet to Mr. Grant, to the annoyance of Kitty, who was short-tempered in her grief over Theresé and Lizzy. Adeline retreated further into her books, punctuated by occasional moments of tearful reflection when she thought nobody was looking. Hazel, having been deprived of her usual bickering partner, had turned on Desdemona, who adopted the defense of never being away from Jane when possible. Jane, in her turn, had become cross and curt, trying to gain space against Desdemona’s best efforts. Everyone’s nerves frayed. 

Phryne found herself taking longer and longer walks out into the city during her down times, willing to risk turning an ankle on the marble of the sidewalks in exchange for some peace. There were gleaming mountain views and skin-prickling ancient ruins by the handsful for her to take in, but she was not allowed to take Jane on her rambles without either Mateo or Kostas as well. She went sightseeing alone, which was not her preferred state. Musings about the case led to analysis of the possible Communist strongholds of the area, which always sent her thoughts bounding from Bert and Cec, to Dot, Mac and Mr. B, to, inevitably, Jack. Thoughts of her family made her wistful in an uncomfortable way she wasn’t yet willing to examine too closely. As she returned that morning, having dined al fresco to avoid another heated luncheon, tugging off her hat in the corridor, there was a clamor at the door of the elevator. Desdemona was being harangued by Louisa as Kostas trailed behind them out of the compartment, clenching his jaw.

“You need to stop letting him out, Desdemona! He gets dog fur all over my clothes, disarranges my papers, and then Hazel goes in to try and fix things and makes it worse. She’s a little magpie as it is.”

“It’s not me that’s doing it!” Desdemona wailed. “He opens the doors unless they’re locked, and Hazel doesn’t like to lock the door on him.”

“Well, tell her stop it then! You were her roommate.”

“You tell her to stop it! You’re the only one she isn’t awful to.” Their voices were rising, but they stopped when they saw Phryne. 

“Oh, hello Miss Fisher,” said Louisa with a shade of an embarrassed curtsy. 

“Trouble with the dog, girls? I can speak to Hazel, if you like.” Both of them blanched and shook their heads.

“Oh, no, it’s a silly thing,” Louisa started. Desdemona interrupted her.

“He’s just too clever, is all,” she exclaimed. “He doesn’t want to obey Hazel all the time though, and it upsets her.”

“Upsets her?”

“It’s… it’s nothing. She gets in a temper and she just needs to be left alone,” Louisa exclaimed sharply. “She’s still a kid, really. Immature, Miss Fisher, honestly.”

“Louisa, are we keeping you?” The girl was wriggling and shifting with ill-concealed impatience, which had piqued Phryne’s curiosity.

“If I could, just, I need to get to the lobby before we go out, I think I have a package there,” she stammered. She made to dart away, but Phryne put out a hand.

“I’ll come with you, Kostas can take Desdemona to the group,” she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. Kostas nodded, his jaw still tight, but allowed them to walk away. “The mail has been a lifeline for me, being so far from Melbourne,” she said conversationally.

“Oh, yes, I suppose so,” Louisa said, suddenly awkward. “I don’t get many letters from home. But I have done a lot of shopping. It’s nicer now that we can go out into the city too.” She patted her travel book reflexively as they arrived at the desk, and Miss Rigas handed her a letter in a green envelope.

“Would you like me to fill out your book, Louisa?” the receptionist asked.

“Please,” the girl replied absently. She had slit the envelope and read the letter, really no more than a note, in a single glance. She crumpled it and tossed it into the bin, then turned to face Phryne with a smile that didn’t seem entirely sincere. “Well, my order should be here soon!” She retrieved her book from Miss Rigas, who nodded a goodbye. As they walked back through the door uniting the corridor with the telegraph office, Phryne caught a glimpse of the receptionist plucking the note from the trash. When she turned back around, Louisa had all but bolted through the doors toward the rest of the group, and was engaging Mr. Grant with an animated laugh. Clearly, she would rather be spending time with anyone other than Miss Fisher. Mateo began herding the group toward the waiting vehicles to take them into town, but a quick headcount indicated Kostas had returned to the hotel, and Adeline was missing as well. A wordless appeal passed from Kitty to Phryne, and she waved them away on their tour.

“I’ll find her, you go along,” she said. “I need to change my shoes.” It wasn’t difficult to guess where Adeline would be, but Phryne wanted to be sure Paulos wasn’t lurking around. She tracked the girl down in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her shoulders crumpled, face blank, and the remains of several sheets of notepaper confettied around her.

“Adeline, there you are,” she said, wondering how best to draw the girl out. But there was no need.

“Miss Fisher, I, I can’t bear to ask Mrs. Grant, but Jane says you… you’ve been all over the world and are… good at keeping secrets and know things about boys. Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Adeline,” said Phryne, “and I will not tell Mrs. Grant unless something that directly affects her, I promise.” It wasn’t a perfect assurance, but it seemed to be enough for the tears to start to fall from Adeline’s long eyelashes into her lap. Her face, though, stayed stone-still.

“Have you ever been in love with someone you shouldn’t have been?” Phryne started, but only barely. It wasn’t that a surprising direction for the conversation to go.

“I have,” she said, the image of René instantly before her eyes. “It made me protect someone terrible and he hurt me badly for it in the end.” Adeline had clearly not been expecting that response. Her tears flowed faster, but she controlled her sobs into a subsumed trembling.

“Even…even though he loved you too? E-even if you had been...t- together, s- s-sort of?” She twisted her plait end in jerky, automatic movements, her dripping eyes fixed on Phryne. Her hands shook slightly, and the one not clutching her hair trembled at the bow of her dress.

“He said he loved me,” Phryne responded. “But he used me for money, for physical pleasure, and for protection. When I refused those things to him, he said cruel things and hurt me, and then, he did the same thing to another woman, who loved him too.” The girl crumpled into a wet heap, leaning her head against Phryne’s shoulder.

“I think Paulos might be the same kind of man,” she said in a whisper. The statement hung in the air like a ghost, and Adeline had to swallow several times before she could continue.

“I told him I couldn’t give him any more…favors… that I didn’t want to carry messages if M-Mrs. Grant was going be in prison for it… and that he should… he should ask… his new… new sweet.…to…” Her face crumbled in grief and the sobs overcame her.

“Do you know who it is that Paulos is interested in now?” Phryne tried to be delicate, but the question set Adeline crying worse.

“No! I don’t even care. I... I hate- hate her, whoever she is. I found his… his… notes in here, and they weren’t to me, so I knew!”

“Was that the day you got hurt on the stairs?”

“Yes,” she said wetly. “Miss Rigas, the receptionist, she took my message for him, but he must have been waiting in the stairs for me.” She held up some of the scraps of paper. “He handed me this, and when I opened it to read it, he…”

“He hit you?”

“At first, at first I thought, I thought he didn’t mean it, or, or, or that he had pushed me out of the way by accident. But then he grabbed my hand and said…” she gulped and controlled her voice again. “He said awful things about me, about Theresé, about Mrs. Grant.” Phryne nodded. The people were different, but the pattern was stingingly familiar. “He said he would break my fingers so I couldn’t write anymore, and my head, so I would stop thinking so much.” Reflexively, Phryne balled her hands into fists, but she kept her voice even.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“Not really,” she sniffled. “I shouldn’t have been so cruel when I rejected him. Maybe if I had done it right, he wouldn’t have been so angry. I’m not pretty or kind like the other girls, I need to do better. But I think Miss Rigas knew. She knows everything, but she keeps everyone’s secrets. She knew Louisa’s mail from her mother and her aunt always came in green envelopes, so when I thought it was one from Paulos, she kept me from opening it and making Louisa angry at me.”

“Adeline,” Phryne said seriously. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If he was going to hurt you, he was going to hurt you no matter how you told him no. But that’s not your fault, and I’m glad you’re not going to give him another chance after that. I’ll put a word in Mateo’s ear and he’ll help keep you safe from him. In fact, I think you might have just helped me clear something else up too.”

“Really?” She turned a tear-streaked face to Miss Fisher again, but there was something else in her expression now. A tiny glimmer of hope.

“Yes, really,” she smiled. She crept an arm around Adeline's shoulder, willing to draw back if the girl flinched, but Adeline leaned into her with a relaxed heaviness that spoke of relief at not being judged. “So, let's wash your face, my dear, and put on something that makes you feel like you can take over the world. First love hurts, but standing up after it hurts you makes you strong.” Adeline nodded slowly, her breath still hitching badly. She was clearly mulling over the idea.

“Miss Fisher?”

“Yes?”

“Could…could I borrow your lipstick?”

\---

The Inspector was organizing booking reports when he was interrupted, yet again, by a commotion. Bert and Cec had barged through the door, frog-marching a slightly battered man between them.

“Tried to do a runner with some poor kid’s bag, then dive under the wheels of the cab, didn’t ‘e now, then.” Bert announced, as Cec tossed the cutpurse to the constable on duty cheerily, then settled in to fill out the paperwork as if he worked there. “Since ‘es smelling so thoroughly of beer, we thought we’d pop in, drop ‘im off, and see what went on at City South when Miss Fisher wasn’t invading the joint every day.”

“Things are busy, Mr. Johnson,” the Detective Inspector sighed, trying not to take his annoyance out on the cabbie. As if to illustrate, he was cut off by a shout from the cells.

“You policeman!”

“Yes, Mr. Giannopoulos, are you awake now? How you managed to take more than two days to dry out is impressive, I must admit.”

“Yes policeman, let me out. I want to go back home now, to go see my daughter.” Bert, curiously, followed Robinson down the stairs and around the corner to where the man was locked up. He was in a sorry state, his face and his clothes equally rumpled with hard wearing, but his hands were broad and creased with scars and calluses, and his eyes lit with vague recognition when he saw Bert.

“Oi, it’s Gia!” Bert said. “Gia, yer daughter went cruising, dontcha remember, ya old soak?”

The old man shook his head. “No, she said she was not going to go.”

“You told me and Cec, two months ago, in the back of our own cab, no less, that your little girl had a fancy friend that was going to send her to the homeland.” Jack’s ears pricked in interest.

“No, no, she changed her mind. She was going to come home. But she isn’t home yet, and I don’t know where she is, but she might be at home, and I need to go see her.”

“Do you remember what ship she was on, Mr. Giannopoulos? I could look for you.” Jack’s hopes rose and were dashed in the same instant.

“No, no, I do not remember, policeman. She said she changed her mind, that the friend was a thief and she would not go, she would punish her and make her sorry, very sorry.” Bert gave a shudder.

“Now there’s a sheila I wouldn’t want to cross.”

“How do you mean?” Robinson fixed Bert with his best interrogative stare as Mr. Giannopoulos slumped over in the corner, mumbling mournfully to himself. Jack would deal with him momentarily.

“Gia’s daughter - notorious snip of a thing, they call her Big GiGi coz she's small as a terrier and twice as mean. She’s gotta coupla bats loose in the belfry. Supposed to have shanked a man when she was thirteen or so for stealing her purse like that bloke we drug in. Them Greeks do awful things to the lads who cross em’, and she’s learned from the best. Cut their hands and feet off, slice their faces, things like that. That’s why Gia was shipping her home. Rumor was she cozied up to a toff who took her along.”

“Do you know the girl’s name, or the name of her friend?” Bert shifted uncomfortably. He still didn’t feel all that friendly with the Detective Inspector. Cops and Commos and ne’er the twain shall meet and all. “Miss Fisher has run into a pair of corpses made the same way as our Greek wharfies do it. I’m thinking there’s a strong connection,” Jack explained. Bert’s face cleared. Cec stuck his head around the corner, having been shamelessly eavesdropping.

“I don’t, but me 'n Bert can find out if you need it. Whereabouts too, if’n she’s in town. Fisher special – Dot can pay us.”

“That would help me a great deal, gentlemen.” Things were starting to shift into gear.

\---

Dot fielded Bert and Cec a few hours later, down at the mouth at the back door of Wardlow. “It’s like she up an’ vanished,” Bert groused into his cup. “We tracked her a hotel round by the docks where she was supposed to be seeing this mysterious friend, and then suddenly she’s gone.”

“Who were you looking for?”

“Sheila named Big GiGi. Real name Laurel Giannopoulos. Detective thinks she mighta stabbed someone and pushed her into the bay. Mighta killed two other people too.”

“Whereabouts by the docks?” Dot said. “I was just down there the other day, looking for a dog.”

“Williamstown,” interjected Cec. “Nicer area than you’d think for a murder.”

“Near the Candleton Hotel? Green awning on the front, new curbs along the side?” Both cabbies looked at Dot, drop-jawed.

“Now, how…?”

“About two months ago, a dog disappeared from that corner. At the same time, someone named Big Gigi went missing. I thought my informant meant another dog, but clearly, she’s a person,” Dot explained, holding up her case notebook, excitement peeking from her smile like sunshine. “There was a dark blue Buick there that picked the dog up with the license starting 44, with at least one young female passenger. I haven’t had a chance to get back to the station to look up the registration, but I did call down to the hotel, and they had a guest registered there with that kind of car.” She felt a flush of pride at their faces as she told them the name.

“I think, Detective Dot Collins, that we need 'ta call the Inspector, and you need to telegraph Miss Fisher right yesterday.”


	12. What is False and What is Real

Phryne, unaware of the urgent messages winging their way through the wires to her, had resolved to try her hand once more at breaking into the investigation from the governmental side of things. Unfortunately, that meant a wrangle in the worst Greek she had ever managed in her life, with Jane barred from the concierge’s room where they were conducting interviews with hotel staff. The result was an ignominious ouster from the proceedings, yet again, with her pride smarting and her new hat thoroughly crushed. She cursed their parentage under her breath as she surveyed the damage.

“You should let them do their job,” a quiet voice said. She jerked around to see Mateo standing in the doorway, a small smile playing on his lips. In his hands was a telegram.

“I’m not good at letting other people find things out,” she said with a scowl. “That’s why I became a detective in the first place.”

“A detective?” His expression showed a remarkable lack of surprise. “I wondered if it was something like that. Your French was almost too fast to follow.” He held out the message for her, and she took it, surprise written across her face.

“You knew?”

“I suspected,” he said, shrugging. “Your Jane does you credit. The second time she gave me the slip, I had to be impressed, and when you arrived, I realized who it was must have taught her.” Phryne gave him a long, searching look. He submitted to her examination impassively, waiting for her decision.

“Right,” she said. “Lizzy’s death was not at the hand of Paulos, though I do think he had an assisting motive in it, and likely Theresé’s as well. I have a suspect in mind, but I need to see the telegram Lizzy was going to send right before she died. Do you know where it is?”

“She did not have it when they found her,” Mateo replied. “But, I can tell you what it said. She showed it to me.”

“Yes?”

“It was a request for money. It said ‘Please send ten pounds. Have been careless again. Must replace jewelry. Forgive me.’” He spread his hands slowly, clearly not understanding why the message would matter.

“Ten pounds? Goodness, that’s an enormous amount of money for resolving a girls’ spat. She must have either damaged something deeply expensive, or someone put the fear of God into her for doing it.”

“I heard shouting, it could have been both.” Mateo furrowed his brow, dark eyebrows beetling as he thought. “That would have been why she wanted to get out of the room.” Suddenly, he put his elbow out for her to take. “They are out walking with Kostas and both Grants. Now would be an excellent time for you to retrieve Jane’s forgotten hat that she has left in the room.”

“It had slipped my mind until just now, but you are very right, sir.” She took his elbow and allowed herself to be escorted.

“Major,” he corrected genially. “Major Nikas. Intelligence. I have a superior who knew your name when I mentioned your arrival, Miss Fisher. You patched him up in France.”

“Really.” She was intrigued. “Who was that?”

“Classified,” the Major replied. “You have five minutes, Miss Fisher.” He turned a stern face out to the corridor as she slipped into the Grants’ new rooms. Inside, she headed straight for Adeline’s jewelry box, followed by Hazel’s and Desdemona’s things. As she had suspected, Adeline was missing a necklace that she had noticed the last time she had searched the room. Louisa’s room held no new scraps of enigmatic paper, but she was also barely unpacked, as if she had banished the maid in the midst of the move. Hercules was sitting proud on Desdemona’s bed, panting and re-coating her effects in a layer of dog fur now that the cleaning was done.

“Good dog,” Phryne said absently. There was something else, something she was missing. As she pondered, she opened the telegram and scanned the message. Another one from Dot. _Wait, what? It couldn’t be,_ she thought. _What would be the odds?_ She wadded up a scrap of paper from the notepad on the telephone desk and held it out to him. “Hercules,” she said, “Go to... Hazel.” The dog cocked his head, and gingerly took the note in his jaws, but did not move. She scanned the note, then tried again. “Find the girls, Alfred.” At that, the dog leapt to the floor, trotted to the entrance of the suite, and put his paws up on the door. When she unlatched it, the lazy lapdog suddenly became a bolt of black fur and shot away.

“Hercules!” Mateo shouted, missing catching the dog by inches as he darted by.

“No, it’s all right Major,” Phryne cried. “He’s the key to all of this. Follow him and we’ve got our girl, I think.” The detective and the Major sprinted after the little pug, who clearly had learnt his way around the hotel. He rattled down three flights of stairs without a pause or a bark, made a hard turn toward the lobby, nails scratching on the parquet floor, and raced toward the front door, which Kostas had just pulled closed behind the returning walking party. Without hesitation, he leapt into Desdemona’s arms.

Mateo’s registered shock, and he pulled up short. “Miss Desdemona? She killed Miss Lizzy?” The group scattered away, Adeline toward Kostas, the Grants together with Louisa hanging onto Kitty’s coat, Jane poised with one hand out toward her friend. Hazel stayed rooted to the spot, a strange expression roiling on her face.

“No,” Phryne said. “She’s the one Alfred likes best. His owner is the one we need to be worried about.” But before she could continue, Hazel sprang toward Desdemona, her nails and teeth bared, screaming like a banshee.

“Stop touching my dog!" She raked at Desdemona's face as she shouted. "I told you if you did it again, I’d kill you!” Desdemona dropped Alfred with a whimper and threw up her hands, but Hazel bowled her over, pinning her to the ground and throwing blows. “Why won’t any of you stupid cows stop touching my things! Alfred is my dog, the brooch is my brooch, and Paulos is my sweetheart!” There was a flash of silver as a blade began to emerge, but before Hazel could pull the knife free from her pocket, Phryne, Mateo and Kostas dragged her off of Desdemona, who rolled over, frightened tears trickling down her bleeding cheeks. Kitty wrenched away the knife and kicked it under a nearby table. Alfred trotted over and pawed at Desdemona, whimpering, as Steven and Jane knelt at her sides.

“He’s MY dog! Mine. Mine…” Hazel trailed off, realizing she was no match for three of them without her knife. In an instant, the tears spouted like a fountain. “She was taking my things. She broke my things! I couldn’t… She took… they were mine! Lizzy stole my things, she broke my mirror, she spilled ink on my shoes.” Her hand flew to her hair where Lizzy’s lily clip rested under a fall of hair. “Adeline flirted with my sweetheart but he taught her a lesson, and my dog likes Desdemona better than me so she’s got to learn a lesson too. And he needs to learn that he can’t like her better than me. I saved him! He was just a little hooligan dog but I brought him with me and we were going on a grand adventure together! But then stupid Hazel was going to take him – take my things so I took hers instead and I’m not sorry at all!”

“But you took their things to make it even, didn’t you,” Phryne said soothingly. Her hands were trembling, so she pressed them firmly to her hips. “You tried to make it even out.”

“Yes, yes,” she sobbed. “Mrs. Grant made me share my room, but she traded me the jewelry, so that was fair. And I was so tired of her calling me Hazel.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Laurel,” she sniffed. “I loved the way Paulos said it too. He said it so pretty and he was so pretty. I would give him the jewelry for his projects and he would buy me bleach for my clothes and send me letters on the dog collar until it broke, and they said ‘Laurel, my beautiful crown.’”

“But then he talked to the other girls.”

“Yes, he was always talking to that awful receptionist. Lizzy said they were together. I couldn’t make Lizzy understand, and it made me so angry and I was only going to scare her into not talking so much. Paulos was going to help me. And then she wouldn’t stop touching my things and she lost my brooch!”

“How did he help you?”

“Alfred took him the message and he set off firecrackers and cracked the window so everyone would go down, and I turned on Louisa’s curlers and there was smoke so I could talk to Lizzy alone, and I was only going to talk to her, really. And then when she wouldn’t listen, it was bad, so I gave Alfred the knife, and he brought it back that night. It was my knife. I wanted it back.”

“What about Theresé?”

“We traded secrets,” she sniffled. “I knew about her, and she knew about me, and we left each other alone. It was fair. And then she decided she wanted to go, and run away, and she was going to tell. She was going to tell when she promised she wouldn’t! And when I told her not to, she fell and I can’t swim, you understand?” Kostas dragged her up, fixing her wrists behind her back with one enormous hand.

“You are going to jail,” he intoned. “We will understand the rest later.” Alternately weeping, pleading and shouting manically, Hazel was dragged away between the Major and his partner.

“What did she mean, ‘I knew about her,’?” Phryne asked Kitty. “What did this Laurel know about Theresé?” Steven shook his head as Adeline began patting Desdemona’s cheeks with her handkerchief, trying to blot her scratches.

“Theresé was a kind girl, I can’t imagine her concealing anything,” he said incredulously.

“Steven, I love you, but you can be more distracted than a box of monkeys sometimes,” Kitty said, breaking free of her shock. “She was sweet on you, and she soured when you didn’t notice.” The man gaped at his wife, who stroked his hand gently. “Honestly, darling, consider how badly she started mending your clothes once she started having to share close quarters with the both of us.”

“Sw- sweet on me?” Simultaneously, Desdemona and Adeline broke into slightly fractured giggles. Jane suppressed an awkward smile. Apparently, he was the only one who hadn’t noticed that fact. “But how could that be enough of a secret that Laurel would trade it to her for the fact that she was an impostor?”

“It wasn’t,” Phryne broke in. “But if she was spying on you, or knew who was, that would have been big enough.”

“But we’d known Theresé for years,” he protested. “We sent her on ahead to meet Louisa – to… to introduce us to her. We trusted her completely!”

“To introduce you?” Phryne sprang back as if he had thrown a bucket of water at her. “I thought you knew her? She’s your business partner’s daughter.”

“We hadn’t met in person,” Kitty said, “Green splits his time all over the continent and his family lives apart from him.” She paused, and the same light dawned in her face. “Oh, good Christ, am I stupid,” she exclaimed. “I never even paused to consider she might not be the right girl. And she’s done nothing but flirt with him the entire. God. Damned. Trip.” Her face darkened in a fury. As one, they wheeled around, but Louisa had disappeared.


	13. Opening Doors

“Louisa?” Steven was completely bewildered, but Phryne and Kitty acted instinctively, as if they had been chasing down thieves and rotten boys throwing stones together only a day previous.

“Fish, head for those stairs. I’ll take the other set. Jane at the elevator with Adeline. Tackle her and sit on her if she comes out. Little snake is going to the room for her suitcase, I’d bet money.”

“Kit, are you sure you can run in those?” Wordlessly, Mrs. Grant shucked her stylish sandals, shoved them at her husband and ran. Phryne retained her shoes, but headed in the opposite direction. Her heels clattered on the stairs, sounding like the cavalry coming. Louisa had better hope it was Phryne who caught her, and not Kit. Mrs. Grant was a stylish, polished, demure society woman. Kit would tear a boy’s braces off and whip him with them til he cried for mercy.

Three flights was something of a climb, and Phryne was beginning to feel winded by the time she pushed her way through the door at the top. Not so Kit. From the other end of the hotel, she heard a roar like a lioness closing on a kill.

“Louisa!” There was a creaking of doors as guests looked out in confusion, and Louisa, after one terrified look down the hall at the angry Miss Fisher and the absolutely enraged Mrs. Grant advancing in a pincer movement, slammed and locked the door to the room. There was another crash as Kitty reached the door and threw herself bodily into it. “Louisa, you’re going to regret this!” She rattled at the lock, and a faint whimper sounded from the other side.

“Kit,” Phryne gasped, “there’s another door.” Her friend nodded and moved to the other side, but it was locked too. They could hear frantic scrambling from inside as Louisa tried to find an escape.

“Fish, we need to get in there,” Kit snarled. “Or maybe you do, so I don’t commit a murder myself.” Phryne took a few gasping breaths, wishing for Jack to suddenly appear to kick the door down. She had her knife, but she had insisted on Jane carrying the pistol for protection. Instead, as they looked at each other, they were interrupted by the polite Ping! of the elevator. Cool as a cucumber, Mateo, Jane and Adeline at his sides, strode forward.

“Locked herself in?” He asked, smiling. “I can fix that.” As if it were a magic trick, he produced a small prybar and hammer from out of nowhere, and applied it to the trim work of the door, just below where the bolt entered the frame. He tapped it lightly, and the trim popped away. Kitty was pacing in a fury, but the Major appeared unconcerned. Underneath, there was another strip of woodwork, which he applied the prybar to as well. Three, four, five sharp blows of the hammer, and there was a clack as the small piece parted ways with the doorframe. He centered his prybar on the now barely-visible stripe of metal that was the door bolt, and dealt a glancing blow. There was a screech as two of the screws gave way, and the door swung open, revealing a wide-eyed and panting Louisa, all but hiding behind her suitcase.

\---

Jack, in the end, had more to do than he had expected when he had first looked at poor, mutilated Hazel Millerton’s body dragged from the bay and wondered if perhaps her black eyebrows had been bleached to hide her identity, rather than as a plain act of gang warfare. The Grecian police had hauled Laurel Giannopoulos in on the double murder of Theresé Magellan and Lizzy Galloway, and if she did manage some sort of defense besides mental incompetence, he had filed measures for her extradition, so she could face Australia’s gallows down as well. He had, eventually, gotten to kick down a door or two, hunting for the real Louisa Green, once Phryne had discovered her school friend Eileen Caron masquerading in her place in Athens. It had gotten his car vandalized at the docks, but the police mechanic was putting the axle to rights. Louisa, thankfully, was unharmed and remarkably ignorant of the whole thing. She had professed that she had been having a lovely time skiing and hiking the wilderness outside Bendigo without her father looking over her shoulder forbiddingly. Barrel Mike’s handsome son Joseph had apparently been plenty of incentive not to contact anyone. Eileen would be getting nothing worse from the court than had already been dished out by Mrs. Grant under the curiously blind eye of Major Nikas, though Jack had managed to bring a few financial discrepancies in the Caron sisters’ books to the eyes of the police accountant. They would be on his radar for quite a while, which would hopefully be enough. It wasn’t likely that any other charges were going to stick. Espionage was only a crime if you committed it against a country. Anything else was savvy business.

“It was an audacious plan.”

“And it worked. For a while. It helped that Mrs. Grant was in prison for a chunk of it and the maid was willing to look the other way. Right up until Steven turned her down without even realizing it.”

“It didn’t help Eileen afterward.”

“Yes well…” Jack trailed off. He was an officer of the law. He wasn’t supposed to be condoning assault, no matter how Collingwood-creative it was. He changed the subject. “Strange how in the middle of running down one crime, two more got turned up.”

“Paulos and his partner Miss Rigas using the hotels as intelligence-gathering grounds for the Communist propaganda machine made everything far more complicated than it needed to be,” Collins interjected. “Once we figured out his aliases, he showed up on half a dozen registers all over the coast. Lucky us, he told his sweethearts his real name.”

“Well,” came Phryne’s voice over the telephone, “we have your wife to thank for breaking the whole thing wide open.” Dot, already a woman given to slight blushing, turned a shade of pink that usually only came in a lipstick tube. “When she mentioned that Christine and her friends spelled ‘Alfred’ with an ‘L,’ I realized the little pendant was a dog’s tag; I gave him a command, and the rest crystallized. Hazel was a sheltered, pampered, charity-minded girl, entering society for the first time at the insistence of her Welsh grandmother. Laurel spoke fluent and conversational street Greek, guarded every penny with ferocity, and had a mutt of a dog that seemed to escape every second minute. I really should have guessed when a doted-on lapdog spent all his time sprinting outside and wouldn’t respond to his supposed name.”

“He’s a good little dog though,” Jane interjected. “Desdemona will take good care of him until they get back next month and can return him to Christine.”

It wasn’t exactly a party, no, Jack wasn’t willing to call it that. Phryne and Jane were in Perth, not here in her front room with the rest of them. She wasn’t floating about with a glass of champagne in one hand, swirling her silk hemline past his knees. He still didn’t know if Major Nikas was one more in a line of conquests for her as she moved on from him, or if she was perhaps only touching down here for a moment, like a gazelle mid-bound, before springing off into the wider world once more. He wasn’t even sure she’d gotten his letter. He couldn’t call it a celebration.

But it was close, he thought, surveying Dot and Hugh leaning happily into one another, Bert, Cec, and Alice playing cards with Mac, his own glass of whiskey, and Mr. Butler with a proud Paterfamilias smile manning the telephone, fitted with a funnel to amplify Jane and Phryne’s tired voices as they reassured everyone that yes, they were down safely, they had souvenirs for everyone, that Rigel had performed admirably, and that as far as Miss Fisher was concerned, Jane was allowed to take all the flying lessons she wanted now that she’d successfully piloted them from Athens to Jhansi. “Oh no, Miss Phryne, you did the hard parts, I just read the map!”

“We’ll see you soon, both of you,” Dot had all but shouted, and they had rung off the line to a chorus of goodbyes. The not-party had dispersed somewhat later, after a few nudges from Mac to Bert and Alice to Cec at the dreamy looks that were floating between the newly-weds. They had departed swiftly, while Jack turned off the gramophone and put it away, looking wistfully at the parlor that seemed to sag with emptiness, deprived of its mistress.

“Goodnight, Mr. Butler,” he’d intoned, and the older man had handed him his hat with a smile.

“Goodnight Inspector,” he’d said. “I’m looking forward to their return myself.” The man looked as if he had a little more to say, but butlerine restraint won out. Jack walked to the tram stop alone, feeling like an oil lamp that had been blown out in a tornado. Not even work was enough to keep him insulated now – it was now just one more reminder every day of the impossibility of her effect on him, and his apparent lack of effect on her. He was working up a really good head of aggravated self-loathing steam when his senses came on of their own volition.

A woman’s heels, click-clacking sharply in the dark. The swish of expensive fabric against gartered legs. A hint of perfume: spice, lemon, lavender, and airplane fuel. The shape of a stylish cloche, with a feather bobbing jauntily, perched on the head of a woman who really ought not to be out this late at night, but of course, she was. A streak of scarlet lipstick barely visible as she glided in and out of the streetlights toward him. He was absolutely, thoroughly struck dumb. He felt certain, if he had been slapped with a halibut in a polka-dot bowler hat, wielded by the Kaiser himself, he could not have been more stunned.

“Hello Jack!”

He was moving. His legs had gotten tired of him thinking, and closed the span between him and her. He didn’t know what his hands were doing – perhaps they’d gotten fed up of waiting on him to make a decision as well. But one of them was on, no, under her coat stroking the smooth curves up and down her spine, and the other one had knocked her hat askew and was in her hair, (where had his hat gone?) and it was fascinating how her lipstick tasted, and now her nails were along his neck, what a wonderful sensation that was. She was here. She was here. She was here, wonderfully solid in his arms, and they were snogging on a public street. An indeterminate and indecent length of time later, he came up for air and discovered that she was still there, and that he had, in fact, kissed her cross-eyed.

“Oh Jack,” Miss Fisher said, momentarily lost for words herself. “I missed you too.” He drew back just a hair, wondering about the how, the when, the where was Jane…

She seemed to read his mind. “Jane is at the hotel, sleeping. We landed in Adelaide and took the train here on the sly, so we could surprise you all. She wanted to deal with all the baggage and the cab and everything in the morning. She knows her own mind about these things by now. But, I couldn’t relax, so I took a ride.” He glanced down at her hand, which had left his hip and was rummaging in her pocket. “I wanted to see what had… changed.”

“I’ve kept the home fires burning, Miss Fisher,” he said, more gruffly than he’d intended.

“I didn’t even know what it was that I wanted to do until the day this arrived,” she murmured. His letter came out of her pocket, battered and bent in her gloved hand. “It came just as I was planning to put us both on a train to Istanbul.”

“But,” he paused, looking at her searchingly, his heart near to bursting. “You didn’t open it?”

“I didn’t need to,” she replied. “I realized I wanted to hear it from you directly, darling.” She looked up at him curiously, eyelashes at half-mast. “What does it say?”

“Nothing this doesn’t,” he replied, and kissed her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you've all enjoyed my very first foray into casefic! It was hairy to write, and I didn't decide whodunnit until way after I should have, but maybe it made for a good puzzle all the same.
> 
> Also, surprise! It's a reunion fic. Ok, maybe that's not super-surprising. But still. You get a big ol' kiss anyway.


End file.
